Beautiful :) I didn't know people were moving around such large sums. I saw a 3400 bc bubble, and a 2000+ bc bubble floating out there.
I wish I was able to distinguish what was going on directly from the sounds. Those huge bubbles sounded exactly like the small ones, and when I saw 50 bubbles appear at once, that also did not sound any different than a single bubble. The amount of simultaneous sounds seems to be limited to a very low number.
Bitcoin clients usually try to diffuse coin ownership by always sending two amounts with one transaction, one (normally smaller) amount is to the receiver, the second amount is to a new address of the sender. So your coins diffuse out over tons of addresses this way, and the true number of coins transferred between individuals is much less than it appears.
It can also be extremely unhelpful, for example to this chap today on reddit:
Who didn't seem to know about return transactions and seems to have lost 90 BTC on that. (Because he/she used a "secure" live environment that would work with a temporary wallet and just one extra address with his/her money.)
And this mistake of trying to be ultra-secure, without understanding change addresses, is a classic way to destroy BTC. It also bit someone for 7208 BTC way back in June 2011:
He only got into that situation because he was using the software in a non-standard way, and he inadvertently deleted the "change-wallet" that had automatically been created for him.
As long as you use the software in a relatively standard way and don't ever delete your wallet files, you'll be fine.
This. If you save all wallet.dat files on any bitcoin clients that you use for transactions, you'll be fine. Don't be scared off by someone using the bitcoin client in a non-standard, unapproved way (and as long as you use the GUI and not the command line interface, you'll not have to worry about that).
Just make sure you understand the software you are using. This mechanism isn't good for the user since you negate the efficiency of backups if your coins constantly move from older addresses to freshly created (unprotected until next backup) addresses.
Some bitcoin clients fix this by using a deterministic generation of new addresses for the wallet.
Deposits and withdraws of Bitcoin will show, but all trades within MtGox are not recorded in the blockchain. It's just Gox moving balances between accounts.
He means Gox moving balances between internal Gox accounts, like hot/cold wallets. Not trades. The trades you and I make on Gox don't show on the blockchain until they're withdrawn.
Change from outgoing MtGox payments does show up in the blockchain, though, and it tends to be relatively large compared to the actual size of the payments. By design there's no reliable way to tell the difference between change and the actual payment either.
Care to explain why not? What stops someone who mined 10k bitcoins in 2007/8 from cashing out. If I remember correctly, there was a guy recently on #startups freenode who showed everyone a screenshot of his wallet at $800k[1] (one sec let me find it in my history) and claimed he mined them all really early.
They are definitely a handful of people who have over 10k bitcoins, but they're not storing it on an online blockchain.info wallet (which is where that screenshot is from). They're also not showing it on IRC.
That kind of screenshot can easily be produced by changing a little HTML on a 0 balance account.
Just to note: it did say there was no sound in Safari, but it was silently edited after the comment edit/delete window on parent ended. Odd you can't even delete comments that no longer apply after the edit window.
Wow, this is great! I got to see a block completed and see a 3392.80 BTC transaction go by - both got me excited enough to be amusing to those around me!
after some digging around the JS, I noticed the sound is completely random except the volume which is based on the quantity of bitcoins
var maxBitcoins=1000;var minVolume=0.3;var maxVolume=0.5;var volume=bitcoins/(maxBitcoins/(maxVolume-minVolume))+minVolume;if(volume>maxVolume)volume=maxVolume;Sound.playRandomAtVolume(volume100);
Big Ben, presumably. This is oddly soothing in an "ew, economics" kinda way. I wouldn't mind letting this run in the background for when there's no wind for my windchime.
this is the effect of the scarcity of bitcoin.
there's a tremendous network effect, more and more online shops accepting them as well as AFK.
it allows much lower fees and risk than credit cards with their 3% plus chargebacks, up to 5-10% better margins for sellers.
You can buy things on amazon via bitspend as well as other services.
And if you still don't trust bitcoin value to not go down, you can use services like bitpay that will convert for you instantly in whichever currency you want.
There's even some VISA prepaid you can top up with bitcoin for the places that don't accept them.
Original creator here, it plots all the transactions it receives from Blockchain.info. It's more or less pulling from the same recent transaction feed that you get if you go to Blockchain.info's homepage. I'd like to think this includes all transactions on the network :)
What feed/API are you pulling from to track these changes. I've been looking for a solid way to chart bitcoin transactions and haven't been able to find one.
Does this mean that a huge transaction for the right amount will hit the perfect low note, and cause everyone within earshot of listentobitcoin.com to simultaneously crap themselves?
Seems to be going fine now. I imagine the transactions are just pretty sporadic. Either that, or it momentarily lost the connection with Mt. Gox and blockchain.info.
i used to do quite a bit of sonification of stock trades. i imagine bitcoin is the thing to use these days though, since realtime stock data was a pain to get and deal with.
I know you were really trying to be snarky about Bitcoin, but in case you hadn't heard, you can actually do things with them. Also notable are https://wrapbootstrap.com/ and Reddit
