Common
questions.

About Timechain Grid

What is Timechain Grid?

Timechain Griddraws Bitcoin's largest holders as a fixed map in your browser: every address that has ever received at least 1 BTC becomes a territory — roughly 850,000 wallet empires — sized by the total BTC it has received over its lifetime, with the biggest at the center. It is not the whole ledger: dust and sub-1-BTC addresses are left out, and each territory is a single address, not a clustered wallet. No account or login. 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 chain data come from?

From a self-hosted Bitcoin full node (bitcoind) that the operator runs and reads directly over JSON-RPC. No third-party block explorer, no Electrum, no commercial indexer. The raw chain is reduced offline with DuckDB and shipped as a static Parquet bundle from a CDN the operator controls. See Docs for the full five-plane pipeline.

How current is the data?

The dataset is a periodic snapshot the operator rebuilds and republishes — not a live feed, and on no fixed schedule. It shows the historical structure of the chain up to the block height it was built at, not real-time mempool 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 should target either timechaingrid.com (the page and its scripts) or data.timechaingraph.com — the operator's own R2 bucket serving the large data bundle and the DuckDB engine (too big for the page host's 25 MB per-file cap), shared across the Timechain sites, not a third party. 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 Grid GDPR compliant?

We collect no personal data ourselves — no analytics, no cookies, no account, no form. The one exception is the CDN edge log (your IP and the path you requested), which an IP-address reading of the GDPR does treat as personal data. We process it only as a technical necessity of serving the bytes (a legitimate interest), keep it no longer than the CDN retains standard access logs, set no cookies, and never link it to an identity or use it to profile you. Beyond that there is nothing to consent to, and no stored profile to delete or export. If you believe this analysis is wrong, please reach us at [email protected].

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. The wallets associated with those early blocks are visible here — they have never moved.

How many Bitcoin wallets exist?

There is no single authoritative count. Hundreds of millions of addresses have ever received bitcoin, but most hold dust, were used once, or are long spent. Timechain Grid focuses on the economically significant end: the roughly 850,000 addresses that have each received at least 1 BTC over their lifetime. An address is not the same as a wallet — one owner can control many addresses, and clustering them into true wallets is a later-roadmap feature — so each territory here is a single address, not a de-duplicated owner.

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?

Reach us at [email protected] or open an issue on GitHub. Technical detail about the pipeline and privacy model lives in Docs.