Life of a Bitcoin

In an earlier post I examined the first bitcoin transaction.  They were generated in block 9, and first transferred in block 170.   Then I started wondering what happened after that, so put together this visualisation.

This only includes transactions occurring up to Nov 22, 2010 10:00PM UTC - after that the number of transactions and addresses increases dramatically and the graph becomes too cluttered to read.  Click on the image to see the full size version.




At the root of the graph is address 12cbQLTFMXRnSzktFkuoG3eHoMeFtpTu3S to which the bitcoins.  The nodes on the graph where the address is abbreviated represent addresses where the balance is zero.

For the other nodes the current balance is shown.  You'll notice that the balances shown sum to much more than the original 50 bitcoins - this is because as bitcoins were moved between addresses they merged with other bitcoins along the way.

This particular graph isn't very meaningful because it is so out of date; but I still find it interesting nonetheless.