Common
questions.

About Timechain Map

What is Timechain Map?

Timechain Mapdraws the geography of the Bitcoin network as an interactive globe in your browser — where reachable nodes cluster by country, how mining hashrate concentrates, and which governments hold Bitcoin — no account or login. Geography isn't recorded on the blockchain, so these layers come from cited public measurement sources, not the ledger; the reachable-node layer is currently a representative sample, with a live Bitnodes feed on the roadmap. It is free, open source, and funded only by donations.

Is it really free — no account, no paywall?

Yes. Every tier, every view, every block — free forever. The source is open on GitHub (MIT). The only thing keeping it lit is people who find it useful sending a few sats on the donate page.

Where does the geographic data come from?

Geography isn't on the chain — the ledger records who and when, never where — so the Map draws on transparent, cited public sources instead: reachable-node measurements (Bitnodes) for where nodes run, mining-hashrate estimates (Hashrate Index), and government holdings (BitcoinTreasuries.NET). Each figure carries its source and as-of date. Those sources are compiled offline into a small static bundle that ships baked into the page and served from a host the operator controls — no third-party call while you browse. See Docs for the full five-plane pipeline.

How current is the data?

The Map ships a static snapshot the operator compiles and republishes — not a live feed — and every figure carries its own as-of date. The reachable-node layer is currently a representative sample of the network's shape; a live Bitnodes feed is on the roadmap. What you see is measured or publicly-tracked geography, not real-time network activity.

Privacy & data collection

What personal data do you collect about visitors?

None. There is no analytics, no tag manager, no cookie banner, no login, and no form that captures personal data. The only footprint your visit leaves is standard CDN-layer server logs (IP + request path) — the same as loading any static website, and beyond our control. We never link that to an identity.

Are there cookies or trackers?

No cookies are set. No pixels, beacons, or fingerprint scripts run. No data is sent to any analytics or advertising network. If you see anything different in your browser, that is a bug — please file a report.

How can I verify that?

Open DevTools (F12), go to the Network tab, and reload. Every request goes to a host we control — timechainmap.com for the page and its baked-in map data, and data.timechaingraph.com for the shared DuckDB-Wasm engine (its ~34 MB binary is too large for the main host). Any other domain would be a bug. A CI gate on every build scans the compiled output for forbidden third-party domains and fails the build if any leak in — it is an enforced architecture invariant, not a policy statement. Read more under Docs → Verify it yourself.

Is Timechain Map GDPR compliant?

We collect no personal data ourselves — no analytics, profile, cookie, or account to consent to, delete, or export. The only trace is the standard server log our CDN keeps (an IP and a request path), which we never store, aggregate, or tie to an identity. Because an IP can itself count as personal data under the GDPR, we state this precisely rather than claim "nothing at all."

Bitcoin basics

New to Bitcoin? Here are the concepts that make the most sense of what you are looking at.

What is the Bitcoin blockchain?

A public, append-only ledger of every Bitcoin transaction ever made, stored as a chain of cryptographically linked blocks. Each block is sealed roughly every ten minutes by a miner who solves a proof-of-work puzzle. No single party controls it; anyone with a full node can verify the whole history independently. Satoshi Nakamoto called it the "timechain"— a chain of timestamped proofs. That name is this project's.

What is a Bitcoin halving?

Every 210,000 blocks (roughly four years) the reward miners receive for finding a block is cut in half. At launch in 2009 it was 50 BTC per block; after four halvings it now stands at 3.125 BTC. The hard cap of 21 million bitcoin is enforced entirely by this schedule — the final satoshi will be issued around the year 2140.

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

The pseudonymous individual or group who published the Bitcoin whitepaper on 31 October 2008 and launched the network on 3 January 2009. Satoshi mined roughly one million BTC in the earliest days and disappeared from public view in late 2010. Their identity has never been confirmed, and the coins from those early blocks have never moved.

How many Bitcoin nodes are there, and where are they?

No one can count them exactly. Reachable — that is, listening — nodes number in the tens of thousands and can be geolocated to a country, but that is only a lower bound: non-listening, NAT, and Tor nodes go uncounted, and cloud hosting inflates data-centre countries. So the Map shows reachable nodes as a sampled snapshot of verification infrastructure — not a census, and never a map of ownership or mining. The current build renders a representative sample; a live Bitnodes feed is on the roadmap.

Can blockchain analysis identify me from my wallet?

A Bitcoin address is not a name. The ledger records public keys and amounts — not identities. However, address reuse, UTXO-set heuristics, and cross-referencing with exchange KYC records can sometimes de-anonymise a wallet. Using a fresh address per transaction, running your own node, and not broadcasting your addresses to third parties all help preserve on-chain privacy.

Still have a question?

Open an issue on GitHub. Technical detail about the pipeline and privacy model lives in Docs.