Bit Decay

Data is temporary

Drag your mouse or finger across the screen.
"Open controls" in the top-right corner to customise your experience.
Bit Decay rewards patience and experimentation.

This can cause a *lot* of visual noise, so start slow if you're sensitive to motion/lights (but everything is under your control).
Set the bit permanence low to see highly dynamic movement and watch the canvas reclaim your drawing rapidly.
Set it high and sit back to watch as your drawing fades & decays slowly over several minutes.
Bit permanence 1-10 fades between 1s-30s, 10-20 takes longer, 30 seconds up to a few minutes. 20-30 is up to probably something like up to half an hour. Just sit back and chill, watch the slowly shifting colours.
The lowest level (the smallest dots) fades the quickest. Each successive level takes about 2x longer to fully fade
The fade will also travel at the speed you paint. Brush slowly if you want a chilled experience!
Play around with the Max Levels setting (controls how many times the bits will split) for interesting results, though this may cause instability!
The menu is slightly fiddly, but I've added a few keyboard shortcuts that might help (see below)
Change the cell shape to see interesting new patterns emerge.
Mess around with the fade colours to give the piece a bold new feel.
All your changes should be saved as long as you come back to the same browser/page.
Nothing happening? Try setting the bit permanence to 1 or 2. At the highest level, things fade slowly. Or it might be paused (click the red button in the lower left). Or it might be broken, try a different browser.
The bit permanence only affects new brushstrokes. This allows for cool effects. Try painting some strokes with a high permanence. Then paint some lower permanence strokes around them, and wait...
Try pausing the interactive to give yourself time to sketch something out. Unpause and then watch as all your hard work pixelates before your eyes!
To improve performance on slower devices: set cell size large, brush size low & Max Levels low
Supports multi-touch on iOS. And maybe other devices too. Dunno, didn't test that!
If you resize the window, press 'R' to reset the grid to fit
This software is presented "as is", it's been tested on various modern bits of tech, browsers and an old iPhone. Hopefully works on most devices! Probably won't work on older/rubbish browsers.
If you find a bug, then consider it a feature. As an artwork minted on a blockchain there's literally nothing that can be done about it!

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Common issues

"This is causing my computer to run slowly" - that seems likely. Try adjusting some of the settings.
"This is making my browser run slow/use lots of memory" - yep, browsers'll do that. I found it worked quite well in Chrome. Firefox seemed to enjoy going on a memory-consumption rampage with it. Though I've no idea if that's just my computer. Who knows.
"This is very complicated and confusing and there's a lot of flashing noise and colour" - this is, unfortunately, the sort of thing I like to build.
"It doesn't seem to work at all" - well, that's just software. And deploying software to a blockchain is streeeesssful, let me tell you. Fingers crossed there's no significant bugs! If it's broken, maybe it'll work on another computer/browser. I tested it on a whole bunch, but there's always some browsers that seem to throw a spanner into the works.

Keyboard shortcuts

[ and ] - decrease/increase brush size
, (or <) and . (or >) - decrease/increase bit permanence
p - pause/unpause
o - toggle controls dropdown
r - reset all cells

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