I understand your concern, but it is very hard nowadays to find a totally unique name that's any good. I did a lot of research on many different names before settling with "Pine". "Pine" was not used by any competing payments or cryptocurrency apps and didn't yield any well-known products or services at the time when I searched for it. However, there are a hand full of apps using the name "Pine" on the App Store, and there's also the Pine64 project and so on. Googling "Pine" now will bring up a new game on kickstarter. But none has made "Pine" into a big trademark yet.
And after all, "pine" has always been the name of a tree.
Today I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve finally released Pine on the App Store! I’ve been working on Pine for almost two years and it’s been in alpha and then beta for the past year. Pine is a bitcoin app for sending and receiving money among your friends and family. It looks like a messaging app but instead of sending messages you are sending bitcoin.
Please give it a try and tell me what you think - I'm excited to hear your thoughts
* Familiar design
Pine’s messenger-like design makes it instantly familiar to use for anyone who has used a messaging app such as WhatsApp or Messenger.
* Easy-to-use addresses
Add your friends using their Pine addresses, which are similar to email addresses. Get a pine.pm address or host your own Pine server with your own domain.
* Natively global
Bitcoin does not have any borders. Transact freely with anyone anywhere in the world – they don't even need to have Pine, as long as it's bitcoin.
* Full control and ownership
Your keys, your bitcoin. Only you are in control of your funds stored with Pine.
* Decentralized and open
Just like bitcoin, Pine is designed to be open and decentralized. The app and server software are open-source and you can host your own Pine server with your own domain if you prefer.
* Protected using your biometrics
By signing transactions with Touch/Face ID, you are the only one who can spend your funds. This prevents unauthorized payments if your phone would end up in the wrong hands.
* Recovery
A recovery key is used to generate your account. By safely storing this key you can recover your account in case you would lose or break your phone. By default, the recovery key is stored in your iCloud account.
* Connect your own bitcoin node
You can run your own bitcoin node so you can broadcast and validate transactions without having to trust anyone. Running your own node can also improve your privacy by not revealing what transactions you are interested in.
️* Lightning support (soon)
Pine will soon get non-custodial lightning support without the need of running your own lightning node.
And H&M, Minecraft, Battlefield, MySQL, Candy Crush, Absolut Vodka, The Pirate Bay, Husqvarna, the pacemaker, the three-point seatbelt, the zipper, and much more...
Each pixel represents a block, where each column is 300 blocks. The orange visualizes the number of unspent transaction outputs per block, and the blue visualizes the amount of unspent BTC per block.
How I made it:
1. Precalculated all block heights to snapshot the UTXO stats at (every 1008 blocks)
2. Downloaded the whole blockchain using the Bitcoin Core client
3. Wrote a script that invalidates all blocks to X using the Bitcoin Core’s RPC
4. Saved a snapshot of the UTXO set using the same method as for utxo-stats.com (see source code below)
5. Saved price with each snapshot (from a csv file downloaded from coindesk.com)
6. Repeated step 3 - 5 by invalidating the next 1008 blocks
7. Copied the source code for utxo-stats.com modified it to load these snapshots one by one
8. Recorded the screen using QuickTime
9. Imported the movie into iMovie and sped it up
This is a website I created just for fun to visualize the distribution of the unspent transaction outputs (UTXO) in the Bitcoin blockchain.
Each pixel in the images represents one block. So the first pixel (counted left to right from the top) is the genesis/first block. If you hover over that pixel in the first image (orange), you'll see that it has a block height of 1, and 1 unspent transaction output in it. If you hover over the same pixel in the other image (blue), you will see that it has a combined value of 50 BTC.
So by looking at these two images, you can see how the UTXOs ("coins") are distributed over the whole blockchain. You can also see where most of the value is stored with the blue image.
Naturally, a lot of the "coins" and its value are concentrated at the end of the blockchain. But it's also possible to see that there's a lot of unspent coins in the blocks of early 2013. The same applies to the blocks in mid 2015.
I'm kind of doing the same but instead I write my analysis and notes in the pull request that fixes the bug. I think it's a great way for others to learn too :)
[0] https://nelly.is