In a dark laboratory deep inside Imperial College London, an image of an earth globe spins across a bank of large high-definition screens. The globe is dotted with colourful columns, which rise out of cities and countries. The pillar of Panama has popped the stratosphere.
The globe is a highly sophisticated data visualisation, mapping in real time the volume and location of transactions on the bitcoin network — the encrypted electronic global payment system.
To the right of the whirling Earth on the next set of 12 monitors is a circle speckled with blue and yellow wriggling lumps of lines. The lumps look a bit like bacteria under a microscope, but they represent the coin-by-coin transactions displayed simultaneously across the globe.
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