Real Bitcoin cases, told in sheets. Each case file follows the trail of a few transactions with Satsumap and public blockchain data. Max Labib reviews them.
12 case files3 open2 coming soon7 classified
REVIEWEDBlocks 0 to 170, January 3 to 12, 2009. At first coins are only created, and in block 170 someone spends one for the first time.
REVIEWEDOn May 22, 2010 a transaction gathers 131 coins and pays 10,000 bitcoin for two pizzas. The chain says where those coins came from, and Satsumap’s analysis gets it wrong about where they went.
REVIEWEDOn August 15, 2010, a transaction spending a 0.5 BTC coin got through because of a bug in adding up its outputs. An hour later it was spotted on the forum, and that night the fixed version came out. Today the transaction is no longer on the chain, and the coin it was spending is still unspent.
How an inference is built from the traces left by mining in the early years, and why it is not proof.
Donations arrive at an address WikiLeaks publishes. The chain shows how much comes in and when.
The block reward is cut in half for the first time. It shows in the coinbase.
What the FBI seizes from Silk Road ends up at a known address. From there, every movement is in plain view.
Bitcoin is stolen from an exchange and, years later, the courts recover it. Following the money at scale.
The coins that existed up to that block also start to exist on Bitcoin Cash. What each chain shows.
Bitcoin's latest major upgrade activates. How it looks on the map.
3,996 BTC leave a bridge, and a negotiation starts that is written on the chain, message by message.
Several people pool their coins in one transaction so nobody can tell whose is whose. Three ways to mix, and one that looks like mixing and isn't.
The case files are built with these tools. You can practice each one in Satsumap, on real transactions.
Where a coin came from and where it went next.
Coins nobody has spent yet.
The same address showing up in more than one movement.
Which output is the payment and which one goes back to the payer.
A transaction that gathers many coins into one or two.
Real transactions, one of each kind, to learn to recognize them on the map.
It looks like an ordinary payment, and it carries a BRC-20 inscription in the witness, RBF enabled, and the change sent back to the same address.
One input and twenty outputs. This is how a service pays many people at once, with a single fee.
Thirty-four small coins gathered into two. It is done when fees are cheap.
Spending it took two signatures out of three keys. The script is only revealed when it is spent.
A 3.125 BTC reward plus fees, and several OP_RETURN outputs with the commitments the pool writes into the block.
An output that can't be spent and exists only to leave a piece of data. Here, readable text.
A runestone in OP_RETURN moves Runes protocol tokens; the money goes back to the same addresses.
Text written to the chain inside the witness of a Taproot input. Look at the content type and how many bytes it takes.