An evolving landscape of creation, survival and spending.
Explore 966,361 blocks in a 4K film. Pause any moment and inspect the outputs behind a pixel.
Read the illustrated guide · Open the explorer · Under the hood
4K · 60 fps · 4h 28m · 3.65 billion historical output records
Published data: genesis through block 966,360, September 10, 2026.
An output appears at its creation block on the horizontal axis and its amount on the vertical axis. It stays there until spent. Many outputs can share a pixel. Colour represents accumulated density, weighted by value in this edition; a flash marks activity.
The newest 105,000-block epoch receives half the plot. Older epochs compress geometrically, with a 120-block slide at each layout change. Time is deliberately uneven: the present gets room while the past remains visible.
The visual guide walks through the axes, two palettes, eras, whale flashes and explorer controls with real frames, short films, enlarged crops and an interactive time-axis demonstration.
Open this exact view. At block 314,000, this pixel contains two unspent outputs. One remains unspent at the published cutoff; the other was spent in 2018. The drawer shows amounts, dates, population over time and candidate transaction matches.
- Pause, magnify and inspect native image pixels.
- Jump by block or UTC date; step through individual frames.
- Separate outputs still unspent at the cutoff from those spent later or earlier.
- Share a block-and-pixel link; resolve candidate transaction IDs when needed.
The high-detail explorer targets desktop browsers with HEVC support. The guide's lighter previews work independently of the full film.
UTXO Timelapse builds on Martinus's original idea with a substantially expanded rendering and exploration system.
| Area | Implemented here |
|---|---|
| Time | Four axis modes, normalized geometric epochs and smooth boundary slides |
| Accounting | Double-precision density, exact remapping from an alive ledger, matching inverse pixel queries |
| Colour & activity | Amount-weighted density, actual-value flashes, a white-hot tail above 10 BTC, compressed extreme-value bands |
| Data | Creation-height-preserving v3 checkpoints, zero-value accounting, full historical lifecycle index and incremental updates |
| Exploration | Magnifier, historical pixel drawer, dates, block stepping, lifecycle charts, transaction matching and share links |
| Delivery | HEVC 4:4:4 film, segmented HLS, private R2 storage, Workers, indexed shards and later-spend patches |
| Updates | Verified prefix-preserving video append, continuous HLS timestamps and coordinated release metadata |
These choices have costs. Weighted colour is not a raw output count. Compressed time changes horizontal scale. Lossy previews can hide tiny points. The compact history does not retain full outpoints, so equal-amount transaction matches can be ambiguous. The technical reference documents the formats, algorithms, API, all 42 settings, measured release evidence and 20 tradeoffs.
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/nostitos/utxo-timelapse.git
cd utxo-timelapse
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --parallel
./build/buv -ns '-tc=density_palette,epoch_transition_mapping,checkpoint_v3'Requires a C++17 compiler, CMake, OpenCV and TBB. FFmpeg encodes the frames. Bitcoin Core and substantial storage/memory are needed to create your own dataset; generated chain files and the full video are not in Git. On macOS, see the tested build flags and test-suite caveat in the operations index.
| Where to go | What you will find |
|---|---|
| Illustrated guide | Learn the image, watch eras unfold, explore real screenshots |
| Technical reference | Data formats, rendering math, settings, API and tradeoffs |
| Operations index | Build, extract, render, update and publish |
| Vocabulary | Canonical terms tied to code |
| September 10 release report | Timings, retained bytes and verification evidence |
| Cloud service | HLS, history shards, releases and deployment |
| Guide source & media | Static site, reproducible previews and provenance |
Martinus's BitcoinUtxoVisualizer supplied the original visualization concept and code foundation. That inspiration deserves clear credit. UTXO Timelapse is maintained by nostitos and has its own visual direction, accounting model, explorer, cloud delivery and update workflow.
The original MIT license and copyright are preserved. Dependencies and font/media licenses are listed in the technical credits.