Live bitcoin map
Via Business Insider, a live map of which currencies are being spent on Bitcoins
The Business Insider post says
[I]n the time we’ve watched it, it becomes clear that China really is big into Bitcoin relative to the rest of the world.
Below is a brief snapshot of what we saw in which the transactions were dominated by Chinese trading (at other times it’s more even, with more US action).
A big reason for the variation would be time of day, but my map above ran for about 17 hours, and it shows much more US than Chinese bitcoin activity — and even more Australian than Chinese. Longer sampling times are clearly needed to say anything definite.
The map website says “watch the world’s currencies flow into BTC in realtime”, which is the sort of exaggeration that’s unfortunately common with bitcoin enthusiasts. These are exchanges of bitcoin for other currencies: one person gets USD and gives up BTC, the other person gets BTC and gives up USD. The only net flow into (or out of) bitcoin comes from the seller’s profit (or loss) as bitcoin changes in price — and that can be much more easily and accurately estimated from the exchange rates, without needing to track individual transactions.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »