This week in bitcoin: Visualizing cryptocurrency

23 hours ago Apr. 25, 2014 - 10:25 AM PDT

In this weeks bitcoin review, we take a look at how bitcoin explainers and visuals are starting to creep into the news cycle.

Bitcoin is a technology has the potential to revolutionize everything, but its hard to explain to an average person what a blockchain is. Bitcoin already has a marketing problem and its complexity is a huge barrier for entry for many people. Adding to the difficulty is that bitcoin does not exist in the physical world so how do we make sense of (and explain) bitcoin? This week brought us several interesting examples as bitcoin was tracked on Twitter and seen on both the small screen and the big screen.

Vox had already done a 19-card explainer on bitcoin, but Ezra Kleins two-minute video on how bitcoin is like internet in the 1980s that was released this week is worth watching to get a good understanding of the cryptocurrency. (For those curious as to what a blockchain is, the answer is around the 25 second mark.)

Bitcoin also made its debut on the big screen this week at the Tribeca Film Festival with The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin. The documentary follows Dan, a 35-year-old computer programmer in Pittsburgh, as he discovers and then follows the rabbit hole down into the deep world of bitcoin and ends as Newsweek exposes Dorian Nakamoto as the creator. Reviews of the film, which also brings the Winklevoss twins into the fold, were largely positive although Coindesk noted that its not a film for rookies to the cryptocurrency space. (For those people, watch the video above).

Gigaom reporter Derrick Harris also did his own visual analysis of bitcoin based on more than a million tweets. He was able to track everything from who the most prolific bitcoin tweeters are to what timezones theyre tweeting from. To give you an idea of how global bitcoin is, this map below from Derricks analysis shows where all of the location-identified tweets were coming from.

Bitcoin had a pretty stable week, only fluctuating from a low of $470 to a high of just over $510.The market closed at $500.26 on Thursday, but had fallento $452 at 10:20a.m. PST amid more rumors of a Chinese crackdown on the currency. For background on why were using Coindesks Bitcoin Price Index, see note at bottom of the post.

In other news we covered this week:

Here are some of the best reads from around the web this week:

Visit link:

This week in bitcoin: Visualizing cryptocurrency