How it works

The Map,
end to end.

The same privacy posture as the Graph and the Grid — nothing third-party at runtime — applied to a different kind of data. Here is the honest pipeline, and exactly what this map can and can’t know.

1. 01

   The honest part

   Geography isn’t on the chain

   Bitcoin’s ledger records who and when, never where. A coinbase names a miner’s address, not their country. So unlike the Graph and the Grid — which read the operator’s own node — the Map’s location layer has to come from outside the chain.

2. 02

   Source plane

   Public, cited measurement data

   Network geography comes from transparent public sources — reachable-node measurements (Bitnodes) for where nodes run; mining-hashrate share and government holdings ride alongside as separately-cited layers (Hashrate Index; BitcoinTreasuries.NET). Every figure carries its source and as-of date and is presented as an estimate — because that is what it is.

3. 03

   Build plane · offline

   Compile a static snapshot

   Those sources are reduced, operator-side, into a small static bundle — a plain file you can inspect, with nothing viewer-specific in it.

4. 04

   Serving plane

   Serve from our own origin

   The bundle is published to storage we control and served from timechainmap.com. No library, font, or asset loads from anyone else.

5. 05

   Serving plane · your browser

   Render locally

   Your browser reads the snapshot and draws the map on your machine. There is no per-view backend call — so there is nothing that could log which country you looked at.

What this map can — and can’t — know

Some geographic facts about Bitcoin are measurable or publicly tracked; others the chain simply cannot reveal. We show the first kind, cited — and never fabricate the second.

• ✓Reachable nodes by country · cited

  Measured directly (Bitnodes): listening nodes geolocated to a country. A sampled lower bound — non-listening, NAT and Tor nodes go uncounted, and cloud hosting inflates data-centre countries. It’s a map of verification infrastructure, not of people.

• ✓Mining hashrate by country · cited

  A cited public estimate (e.g. Hashrate Index), shown with its as-of date. Country shares are genuinely fuzzy — pools route through other jurisdictions, miners use VPNs — so it is always an estimate, never a measurement.

• ✓Government Bitcoin holdings · cited

  Public and trackable: coins a state itself controls through law-enforcement seizures, treasury purchases or state mining (BitcoinTreasuries.NET), shown as BTC, a share of the 21M cap, and a price-dated USD value.

• ✗Total Bitcoin held by a country · not derivable

  Not derivable. A Bitcoin address carries no nationality, so the total held by a country’s people or firms cannot be read from the chain — and we never present one. The government holdings above are the tracked exception, not the whole.

• ✗Transactions between countries · not derivable

  Not on the chain either — a transaction’s endpoints have no location. The flickering arcs on the globe are an illustrative motif, never transaction data.

Questions about the data pipeline, privacy model, or Bitcoin basics? See the FAQ.