Introducing the Bitcoin Bible Project

Augmented Network Spirituality

I made a little digital art project called “The Bitcoin Bible”. It’s an entry in the genre of network spirituality. Currently, its only manifestation is a twitter bot that lives here @theografia.

The concept of the project is simple. On average every 10 minutes the bitcoin network produces a new block, indexed by a 32-byte blockhash. Since the blockhash is unpredictable, it can be used as a random index to select from a data set - a data set such as the Bible. 

The King James Bible (without apocrypha) has 31102 verses in it and the number represented by a blockhash is a lot bigger. So I take the blockhash modulo 31102 to select a random verse and tweet it. The bot updates its twitter feed with each new block that is delivered to my bitcoin client. It doesn’t currently handle chain reorgs.

Now this is very cool. But I thought of adding a little twist to make it a bit cooler. Why not add a salt to each blockhash so that the Genesis Block, block 0, maps onto Genesis 1:1? I found a salt that would do this. I consider this the “correct” mapping of Bitcoin hashes onto the Bible. 

What is the meaning of this project? Well, the human brain is pretty good at finding patterns in randomness. So you’ll just have to impute your own meaning onto it. Maybe you want to look up the verses that correspond to the halvenings, or major bitcoin upgrades, or important dates in your life.

If you already follow a lot of people on twitter, then following @theografia may be a welcome spiritual addition to your twitter feed. If not, be warned that this bot may tweet too frequently for you — about once every 10 minutes or so.

Eventually, I plan to implement a browser plugin that will augment popular block explorers with the Bible verse that each block maps onto. 

Check out the source code on gitlab.