/r/place backed by the Bitcoin blockchain

Pixels on a canvas

On April 1st 2017, Reddit unleashed /r/place to the world. I like to think of it as a modern art experiment. A user could change the color of a single pixel on a canvas every 5 minutes. This is what came out of it:

A similar experiment happened in 2005 when a student sold pixels on a canvas to fund his university education. It was dubbed The Million Dollar Homepage. More on that here.

Would this work for Bitcoin?

The experiment starts with a 100x100 grid, each pixel having 16 BTC addresses attached to it, one for each possible color. The address with the most bitcoin received, decides the color of the pixel.

Let’s look at the pixel at coordinates [45,52]. The green color of that pixel has the address 1Fdi1pTd4rhUyDVtFPmCzTXpdVaxYKPzFi and a balance of 0.01 BTC. Out of all the colors which correspond to that pixel, green has the most BTC received so the pixel is green. If you would like to make it red, you would need to donate so the red address has more balance than the green balance.

I was really curious about using the blockchain as a database. I guess I found a way :)

How does it work? On a server, I am running bitcoind in prune mode, I pre-generated the addresses for each pixel and labeled them. A cronjob asks the bitcoind through the RPC interface for the balance of each pixel and computes a JSON file and an image. These 2 output files are than transferred to a server which serves cryptoplace.

For the frontend, I am using Leaflet and imgViewer2. After experimenting I think I would have been happier if I implemented the UI from scratch - although the libraries saved me a lot of time.

The code is open source, you can find it here.

Would you like to see support for other crypto currencies? Which ones? I am happy to answer any question you might have.

Go ahead, you can draw anything!