[_hdap]

I am NOT a fan of Bitcoin, but...

Watch a real-time visualization of the global Bitcoin transaction flow, as it is happening right now:

https://dailyblockchain.github.io/

Each square is a bitcoin address (like a cryptographic public key)

Each graph component is a transaction. The components appear as transactions are broadcast into the bitcoin P2P network (but before they are verified and committed to the blockchain)

Each transaction simply transfers bitcoin: from one or more input addresses, to one or more output addresses. In other words, money flows from one or more previous owners, to one or more new owners. That's how a currency works

Coin ownership flows from green to red (yellow is in/out: I pay you and take some change back at the same address)

When the output of one transaction becomes an input for a new transaction, the components are pulled together

This illustrates how Bitcoin is used. What do you notice?

[Imnimo]

I notice that some rando on github can make a chart of my financial transactions since they're all public.

[staplers]

Banks already sell that to advertisers and whoever is willing to pay.

[tudelo]

What do you notice? Not sure what you are trying to allude to.

[iforgottherest]

Plenty of individual transactions (at least on this recording time scale) and not a flow as an economy would daily. Plus some odd transactions where money is allocated to several wallets at the same time.

I wish it had the relative size included in the visualization.

[ric2b]

This is a real-time visualization so I wouldn't expect anything else even if it was showing USD, it's not like the supermarket immediately turns around and sends my payment to someone else as soon as I grab my grocery bags.

If you just take a 10 min snapshot of transactions in any currency I don't expect to see a lot of transactions flowing to each other.

[blhack]

I notice that this looks like the type of thing you'd put up on a big monitor to impress investors/PHBs with when they walk by.

[ur-whale]

> What do you notice?

Formation of large aggregates?

[edit]: pretty blinkenlights?

[JoshTko]

1. Majority seems to be two accounts consolidating into one 2. Not a lot of interconnection

[deweller]

for (1), what you are seeing is a payment and a the "change" going back to a new address owned by the sender. This is a very common pattern of bitcoin use.

[wjdp]

Why would there be "change" in a Bitcoin transaction?

Is this: send me £10 in BTC but actually send me £15 in case the price changes and I'll send you back the difference.

[mplewis]

In Bitcoin, reusing an address gives folks who watch the blockchain information about whose money this is and what they use it for.

Let's say you have $20 in your address, and you want to spend $10 on candy bars. A common pattern of use is to spend all $20: $10 goes to the candy bar company, and $10 goes to a new address you just created. This helps obfuscate how much money you actually have.

[saurik]

It isn't just about obfuscation: even if you always send money back to your own address that ends up being a round-trip on your own money as "change". And "in your address" also doesn't help the mental model here because addresses only have money by summing up all of the outputs that are spendable by the associated key, which leads to the change question in the first place (as you definitely can spend part of your money).

The analogy I would use is that Bitcoin exists in your wallet as like a bag of gold nuggets. To do a Bitcoin transactions is to take a pile of gold nuggets, melt them together, and then pour off a handful of new piles that you let cool back into nuggets. These nuggets are inherently of awkward value units as, if nothing else, the price of gold keeps changing. So you aren't going to have a set of nuggets that ever correctly maps to "price of hamburger". What you do with the resulting nuggets is up to you, but the total amount of gold in the input nuggets and the total amount of gold in the output nuggets has to be the same. This inherently will lead to most transactions involving creating an output nugget that is "change" (all the gold left over from the input nuggets that I wasn't actively intending to use).

[stevewodil]

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Change#:~:text=When%20the%20outpu....

[yters]

I see a number of transactions that pay out to a large number, or aggregate a large number. Not sure the meaning of the big graph components.

[jayd16]

Are those the money laundering services that hide transactions in group payouts?

[federicobond]

They are probably exchanges doing batch withdrawals (large number of outputs) or consolidating their holdings into a single large output for economic reasons (large number of inputs)

[ad404b8a372f2b9]

It's almost always at least between 3 addresses, 1 green to 2 reds. Is it because exchanges take a percentage of each transaction?

[federicobond]

Most transactions will have two outputs. One is the actual destination and the other is change that goes back to the spender wallet. There is nothing unusual going on here.

[ad404b8a372f2b9]

The description says change is described as yellow nodes though, also all three addresses are different

[37ef_ced3]

A Bitcoin owner typically controls many addresses. It is typical to create a new address to receive change. But (apparently) sometimes an address is reused (to receive change), and that's the yellow

[jjnoakes]

The change address is usually different from the other two.

[game_the0ry]

It looks like cells of an organism multiplying.