Ex herbario · the first plate
Every number has a flower folded inside it.
BTC Flowers is a small atelier for seeded blooms. Give it a word, a name or a block number, and it grows one specimen that belongs to that seed alone: drawn in ink and petal, labelled in mock Latin, and ready to be pressed into a herbarium of your own.
Plate I was grown from the number 210000, the height at which Bitcoin's block subsidy first halved. The same digits will always grow this same flower, on any device.
Merilia hendecapetala var. recta
Rose Pompon · straight-petalled
Block height210000
The field method
Three movements, no soil required
A botanist who loves numbers keeps two notebooks: one for what grows, one for why. The atelier keeps both open at once.
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Name the seed
Type anything: a word you cannot shake, a friend's name, the height of a block that matters to you. Numbers are read as numbers, everything else as plain words, and capital letters are politely ignored.
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Watch it bloom
The seed is boiled down to a fingerprint, and the fingerprint decides the petals, the rings, the hue, the curl, the leaves and the stamens. The bloom takes a few slow seconds; if your device asks for reduced motion, the flower simply appears.
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Press it
Plant the flower and it is pressed into the herbarium kept in your browser, with a plate number like a proper catalogue. Download it as an SVG to print, frame or send to someone who will appreciate a flower with a pedigree.
From the field notebook
Five pages to begin with
Each page below is a seed we could not resist. Choose one and the atelier opens with it already on the bench, ready to grow, press or download.
- Pl. 0 · Block 0The genesis seedHeight zero: the first block, mined in January 2009, is where every count begins.
- Pl. 210000The first halving heightThe subsidy halves every 210,000 blocks, and this is where it first did.
- Pl. 420000Two cycles inTwice 210,000: the height of the second halving, and a very different flower from its sibling.
- Pl. “orchard”A word, not a numberWords grow as readily as digits. This one comes from a single plain English word.
- Pl. “nonce”A miner's wordA nonce is the number a miner varies while searching for a valid block. Here it is only a seed.
A gift that weighs nothing
A sentence only two people can read
Most digital gifts are a link that eventually goes quiet. A seeded flower is different: it is a small drawing and a private key to it. Choose a word that means something to the two of you, grow it, download the SVG, and send the file without saying what the seed was. Anyone who types the same seed into the atelier will grow the identical flower, so you can reveal the word whenever the moment is right.
The file is plain SVG, so it opens in any browser, prints cleanly, and can be framed, embroidered from, or tucked into a card.
- The anniversary wordPick the word you both use for a place or a day. Grow it, press it, print it on good paper.
- The remembered heightIf you remember the block height of a day you will not forget, make that number a flower and write the story on the back.
- A small bouquetGrow three or four related seeds, such as consecutive block numbers, and see how neighbours in a sequence look nothing like each other.
An invitation
Put a seed on the bench
The collector's slip is the whole interface: one line, one button. Write whatever you like and the atelier will open with your seed already growing. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is looked up, and there is no account to make; the flower is computed on your own device, from your own words.
BTC Flowers is an independent project and is not affiliated with any Bitcoin company, wallet, exchange or developer. The Latin names are playful inventions, not botanical claims.