How it grows · the botanist's working
There is no randomness in the atelier, only arithmetic that looks like nature. Here is every step from the text you type to the petals on the plate, shown with a live specimen you can dissect.
Two 32-bit hashes, 64 bits in all
Numbered markers on the specimen match the six traits listed beside it. Choose a trait to dim everything else.
All six traits are shown. Choose a number, or use Next trait, to look at one at a time.
The working
After the fingerprint is made, the atelier takes numbers from a seeded stream in a fixed order. Each is a decimal between 0 and 1. The table shows the first seven for the specimen above, with the arithmetic that turns each into a trait. Change the seed and the whole table is redrawn.
| Trait | Range | Draw | Working | Result |
|---|
Seven more draws follow for finishing touches: petal width, how pointed the tips are, the sway of the stem, the starting angle, the size of the centre, the size of the leaves, and the two halves of the Latin genus name.
In plain words
Your seed is first tidied: spaces are collapsed, capitals are lowered, and a number loses its commas and leading zeros. The tidied text is turned into bytes and passed through two small, well-known hash routines of the FNV family, one reading forwards and one backwards, each finished with a bit-mixing step. The result is two 32-bit numbers, a 64-bit fingerprint. Change a single character and both numbers change completely.
The fingerprint seeds a tiny pseudo-random generator. It is not random at all: given the same fingerprint it produces the same stream of decimals in the same order, every time, on every device. The atelier reads the stream like a recipe card: first the petals, then the rings, then the hue, and so on down the table above.
Each petal is one curved outline, copied and rotated around a centre. Curvature leans every tip sideways, so a high value makes the ring swirl like a pinwheel. Rings alternate by half a step so they interleave, shrink by a fifth each time, and deepen in tone. Stamen dots sit on a golden-angle spiral, about 137.5 degrees apart, the same packing that sunflowers use. Leaves ride a stem whose sway is drawn from the seed too.
Two different seeds could, very rarely, share a fingerprint and so a flower. Coordinates are rounded to two decimals, so tiny differences between browsers cannot change a trait, though they might in principle nudge a pixel. And the Latin names are made from fragments chosen for sound: a genus assembled from syllables, an epithet counting the petals in invented Latin, and a variety naming the curl. They are charming, not scientific.
Bitcoin counts its blocks from zero. Block 0 is the genesis block, mined in January 2009, and a new block is targeted roughly every ten minutes. The atelier uses block numbers as nothing more than digits: it never looks at the chain, a node, or any block's contents.
The block subsidy halves every 210,000 blocks, and the total supply is capped at 21 million. Both numbers make good seeds, which is why they turn up as examples here. Neither says anything about what any flower is worth, and this site does not discuss prices.
Bitcoin's proof of work uses SHA-256. The atelier does not: a quick, non-cryptographic hash is perfect for scattering seeds into petals, and would be the wrong tool for anything that needs security. Never use a flower as a password.
BTC Flowers is an independent art project. It is not affiliated with any Bitcoin organisation, wallet, exchange or developer.