Distributed cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have a rather controversial feature. Namely, that for the currency to be uncontrollable by any single entity, every single transaction of the entire economy has to be visible by everyone.
How Money Moves is a Digital Art Piece - a sort of dynamic painting - visualizing every single monetary transaction right as is happens on the digital bitcoin network. The artwork built on web technologies connects to a backend server using websocket to receive real time information about the transactions happening on the network.
Every monetary transaction - however small - appears on the screen as a set of symbols. The 64 character long hexadecimal strings are transaction-ids calculated as the cryptographic hash (sha256x2) of the content of the transaction.
The transactions being revealed on the screen from different directions symbolize the fact that in a distributed network we don’t really know the origin of such messages.
As a matter of fact, the order in which the messages appear is also subjective to the viewer. People observing the piece on different computers might see variances, but eventually everyone will have seen the exact same transactions. At least that is the promise of the crypto currency.
A patient observer might also find times of the day when the financial highway is less busy, or times when it almost seems to jam. However because the bitcoin network is an international, always open exchange, the traffic never stops. Ultimately as the bitcoin currency becomes more liquid, the frequency of the transactions, hence the overall appearance of the artwork will change over time.
The transactions displayed on How Money Moves are movements of just a single crypto currency, but there are many other currencies and networks (namecoin, dogecoin, ethereum, stellar, etc) that could be incorporated into a more complete art piece in the future.