Bitforce5 is reborn! It's a blockchain visualization that uses a force-directed graph. BCH telemetry has been added (and about time!)

I wrote BitForce5 for Bitcoin years ago, long before the fork. This last weekend I dusted off the cobwebs, added BCH and tuned up the presentation.

It was created as an educational exercise to learn about d3, Data-Driven Documents library, specifically the force-directed. A steady stream of transactions from the blockchain made an ideal data source. This time around I had an interest in Quasar and Vue.js frameworks and decided to overhaul BitForce5. One cool Quasar feature, right out the box, an appt can be installed as a PWA on your mobile device.

I've wanted to add Bitcoin Cash activity for some time now but never found a good data stream. The original data stream was blockchain.info. It's still an option, but it doesn't emit BCH events. They also crippled the available BTC data points, and it doesn't emit all trxs. So I looked at TxStreet and added it as a source.

If anyone knows of other BCH blockchain streams (websocket), I'd be interested, especially one that includes the value for each input/output address.

Be sure to browse the settings menu in the upper right to fiddle with the graph parameters. It's still very much beta as I continue to add back features from the original site and smooth out the graph performance.

Fun fact, when I wrote bitforce5.com there were so few transactions on the network that I had to wait nearly a minute for the next trx to pop. It took a half-hour before the nodes filled up. I had to write a test data generator to spew fake trxs to see any meaningful amount of action. Of course now it takes less than a 15 seconds to flood the whole display. And you can mix both the BCH and BTC action.

Note: It can get overwhelmed with both BCH and BTC operating. There are times, often before a BTC block appears, when the data stops flowing and appears to spool up. And then bang! All of the transactions flood in at once and explode onto the screen. Unfortunately, this can overwhelm the browser. If this happens tune down the Max Edges setting. I highly recommend running in Chrome as it appears to handle the SVG/Javascript load better.