
Realtime Bitcoin - almostdigital
https://realtimebitcoin.info
======
oskarth
I also recommend people check out the author's website: [https://johan-
nordberg.com/](https://johan-nordberg.com/) \- it has quite a neat realtime
chat interface.

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lelandbatey
Holy crap that's really cool! For one, the interface is very pretty, for two
_he is actually chatting in real time with you once you enter the site!_ I
asked him how he does it, he says he built the chat mostly as a frontend to
Slack, so he gets messages on his phone and can respond to them on his phone.
Pretty cool!

~~~
vmasto
Oh Christ I thought it would be a bot. My apologies to Johan.

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tsukaisute
Similar also beautiful page for the Ethereum network:
[https://ethstats.net/](https://ethstats.net/) (I'm not the author, just a
user.)

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prohor
1.7 GW power. Wow! That means about 1 ton of CO2 released per hour (according
to: [https://carbonfund.org/how-we-calculate/](https://carbonfund.org/how-we-
calculate/)).

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
That is only true for burning fossil fules. Considering that the Hover Dam can
generate 2 GW peak, the bitcoin network could feasibly run on renewable
energy.

~~~
idibidiartists
using something that is practically infinitely abundant (renewable energy) to
create an artificially scarce medium of exchange is illogical to say the
least... why not use renewable energy itself as the self-valued currency?

~~~
Setepenre
Energy price's are highly volatile because you cannot control the supply in a
timely fashion nor store energy for later usage (in amounts that matters
anyway), i.e it would be a worse currency.

Scarcity is a good attribute for a currency. Plus having a currency that
mirror an asset (gold, energy) is actually a bad idea economically speaking
because then the currency cannot be used in time of crisis to soften economic
downturns. Which is what was used during the 2007 crisis. People do not
realize how much worse the 2007 crisis would have been without the measures
taken by the Federal Reserve.

IMO, the attractiveness of bitcoin is about being a secure decentralized
payment system everything else is fluff. Such a system takes some energy to
work what a surprise...

Do you guys think that all the financial institutions combined use less energy
than bitcoin ? Bitcoin is probably using a lot less energy...

~~~
eru
> Plus having a currency that mirror an asset (gold, energy) is actually a bad
> idea economically speaking because then the currency cannot be used in time
> of crisis to soften economic downturns.

I shared your concern until recently. But then I learned more about fractional
reserve banking: with suitable (lack of) regulations banks can and will create
just the right amount of extra bank money to satisfy extra demands from the
general population for holding extra money.

Historically, just conditions have held in eg the free banking episodes in
Scotland, Canada, France, Australia. (I think in the Song dynasty in China,
too.)

[https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-
about-...](https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-about-free-
banking-history/) has a bit of background on history. And George Selgin has a
bunch of paper really delving into the automatic adjustments that profit
seeking banks will produce on their own accord.

~~~
notahacker
Australia's free banking period ended up with a property bubble and banks
going bust, causing the country's worst ever financial crisis. Instead of
"creating just the right amount of extra money", other banks suspended
trading.

But free banking is much closer to the way major currencies actually operate
today (which also involves money supply determined primarily by banks'
willingness to extend credit and fluctuating from day to day) than the concept
behind Bitcoin or indeed the gold standard (supplies of a particular currency
should be limited by [proof of] specific type of work and only able to grow,
and very slowly)

~~~
eru
For comparison, [https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-
about-...](https://www.alt-m.org/2015/04/28/what-you-should-know-about-free-
banking-history/) :

> Australia. Operating with few restrictions, Australian banks were large,
> widely branched, and competitive, and they practiced mutual par acceptance,
> making the system resemble Scotland’s. The Australian episode is of special
> interest for suffering the worst financial crisis known under a free-banking
> system. After a decade-long real estate boom came to an end in 1891, some
> building societies and land banks failed, after which 13 of 26 trading banks
> suspended payments in early 1893. George Selgin (1992a) finds that the
> banks’ reserve ratios do not indicate any overexpansion of bank liabilities
> during the boom, though some banks clearly made bad loans. The boom was
> rather financed by British capital inflows, which suddenly stopped after the
> Baring crisis of 1890. Kevin Dowd (1992) adds that the banks were not
> undercapitalized. He argues that “misguided government intervention” in the
> first failed institutions “needlessly undermined public confidence” in other
> banks, while other interventions boosted the number of suspensions (all but
> one of the suspended banks soon reopened) by providing favorable
> reorganization terms for banks in suspension. (For a different view, see
> Turner and Hickson (2002).

I don't understand your second paragraph. You can have free banking in a gold
standard or in a fiat regime. The historic free banking episodes regularly
cited were in a gold standard setting. (But perhaps the confusion comes from
'Internet-Austrians' common insistence on 100% reserve banking as a mandatory
feature of what they'd call a gold standard?)

(Bitcoin in its current parameters is more or less trying to imitate a gold
standard.)

~~~
notahacker
You seemed to understand my second paragraph pretty well tbh.

Internet Austrians and Bitcoiners believe that what is used as money should be
a commodity with highly constrained supply, hence full reserve requirements
for the former and a unified ledger and no credit-creation mechanism for the
latter. Free bankers (and some altcoiners, and the economic mainstream)
believe that what is used as money should be a promise from a financial
institution with a flexible supply based on credit creation (disagreeing with
each other on whether it's best backstopped by convertibility to a
[quasi]commodity or central bank reserves under stricter regulations)

Free banking fanatics' arguments that Australian free banking practices were
fundamentally sound and systematic collapse happened only because the
government saved some of the worst ones should be taken with the same pinch of
salt as anarchists' claims that people are fundamentally non-violent with
crime occuring mainly as a reaction to police brutality.

~~~
eru
Sure, it's good to be wary. Though even blaming any crises at the end of free
banking episodes, still seems to leave a pretty good track record overall.

As an aside:

Reading about how free banking can automatically can adjust the amount of bank
money created over eg a fixed amount of gold to keep nominal GDP stable even
in the face of eg increased demands for holding money from the general
population, made me much more sympathetic to bitcoin's fixed supply than I'd
been before. Since some kind of inflation, price level or nGDP targeting
seemed like a good idea for a currency regime, and I could only assume that
bitcoin was bound to fail before.

Of course, the mechanism George Selgin describes don't necessarily have to
work that way. But at least it's something that looks plausible.

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mmccaff
Beautiful design!

Care to share any of the details on the tech? Are you using each of the
exchange's individual APIs to calculate the weighted average? Did you use any
library or framework to help with websockets, or to look at the blockchain?

The meaning of "Estimated Money Sent" was a little confusing to me, even after
reading the definition on the About page.

What do the scrolling numbers in the background mean? I imagine there aren't
enough of them to be all of the realtime transactions happening on the
blockchain. Also, I'm sure you know, but they overlap when showing as 600x120
in iframe mode.

Allowing users to embed the widget in an iframe is nice and a good way to
spread the word about your site. Maybe unbury that from the About page and
link directly to an 'Embed this' page from the main page, and (as silly as it
sounds) use something like clipboardjs to make copying the snippet to the
clipboard easier.

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alex_duf
The amount of power we're wasting computing a giant rainbow table drives me
mad.

We could at least burn coal to compute something useful.

I'm not dismissing bitcoin altogether as it brought a great deal of
interesting concepts, in fact I even mined a very small quantity once uppon a
time. But right now the whole hashing random number madness is mostly a waste
of energy.

I don't think we should afford 1.7GW (apparently 500MW according to a comment
bellow) of power as long as we're still burning fossil fuel somewhere on
earth.

~~~
DINKDINK
Why aren't you mad about all the gigawatt hours that are wasted powering
banks, bank servers, armored trucks silly moving fancy paper from business to
banks, printing presses, the distruction of various ecological areas to take
the mineral gold out of the ground, VISA servers, printing Visa cards etc.

Just because the method to defend against unmodified database entries in the
Bitcoin blockchain is very evident and the evidence of ecological cost to our
current financial system is largely silent doesn't mean one can ignore those
costs.

~~~
alex_duf
It's the nature of the computation that bugs me.

We have a network growing exponentially relying on the fact that we're hashing
random numbers. Academic research aside, it sounds very useless.

That has nothing to do with the way banks are doing their maths or maintaining
their infrastructure. Again, I'm also very grateful of bitcoin demonstrating
we can exchange value without a 3rd party, but it looks like nowadays we could
do better.

Now in regard of the destruction of ecological areas, mining gold etc... I
simply agree with you.

~~~
grondilu
> That has nothing to do with the way banks are doing their maths or
> maintaining their infrastructure. Again, I'm also very grateful of bitcoin
> demonstrating we can exchange value without a 3rd party, but it looks like
> nowadays we could do better.

If you have a better idea, we're all ears.

~~~
alex_duf
computing prime numbers, searching new decimals of pi, folding proteins or
whatever useful calculation there is to do out there.

~~~
grondilu
I once suggested protein folding on bitcointalk.org. The thing is : it's
easier said than done. Folding protein can not trivially be used to mark data
as a cryptographic hash does, and you need this for the whole protocol to make
sense. But if someone can come up with a proof of concept, we'd all be happy
to look at it.

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djhworld
The money sent metric is interesting, is that what's actually going on right
now?

I have a miniscule amount of BTC (currently 'worth' £20), I just bought it out
of novelty really, never found that much of a use for it outside of buying
gift vouchers.

Where is all this money going? People just trading the currency between each
other? Retail?

~~~
isubkhankulov
dark markets, ransomware, bypassing capital controls, tax avoidance,
international payments, backpage ads, speculative trading

~~~
trakout
Care to expand on backpage ads?

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hehheh
He or she's talking about backpage.com. They're infamous for hosting
prostitution ads.

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em3rgent0rdr
Beautiful. I think text size should always be proportional to log(transaction
size) for better visual processing. I notice once $650,000 which was indeed
larger and slower, which was great, but would be nice if had text size
function change over entire range.

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kensai
I think near the "coins in circulation" as $ rate someone should add a big fat
disclaimer: "AT CURRENT EXCHANGE RATE". I know this applies to every currency,
but given Bitcoin's volatility, it goes without saying...

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kobeya
Also, AAPL is worth $800bn with the big fat disclaimer: "AT CURRENT STOCK
PRICES".

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oculusthrift
yes because apple stock doubles or halves every 6 months and is routinely
stolen.

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awqrre
I usually use [https://btc-e.com/](https://btc-e.com/) because it also offers
the value of other coins...

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wklm
I'm wondering what are they using

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gtirloni
Wappalyzer usually has good results.

[https://wappalyzer.com](https://wappalyzer.com)

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oculusthrift
is there any reason this is trending? i've been using this site for years..

~~~
macawfish
Recently, Bitcoin nearly hit $3000. I think a lot of people are curious about
what this all means.

