About
Background, goals, and technical direction behind The Bitcoin Watchmaker and its mechanical Bitcoin watch project.
About The Bitcoin Watchmaker
Mechanical Time, Built One Hard Lesson at a Time.
A workshop journal about craft, patience, precision, and the strange joy of building a watch around Bitcoin.
Graphic designer, 2D animator, software developer, AI enthusiast, watchmaker wannabe.
I use design, software, machining, and stubborn persistence to turn ideas about time, value, and Bitcoin into something mechanical you can hold in your hand.
I am Feli — graphic designer, then 2D animator, then software developer, then AI enthusiast, and now a watchmaker wannabe. This site is where all of that comes together.
I am not coming to watchmaking from the traditional path. I came through drawing, software, problem-solving, and years of obsession with how things are made. What started as curiosity turned into machining parts, studying mechanisms, making mistakes, rebuilding setups, and slowly learning how to make things with real precision.
fzl.watch is my bench log: prototypes, failed cuts, fixtures, tooling, and the slow process of building a mechanical watch from scratch.
Why this exists
This is about legacy.
I have three daughters. I want to leave them something that is extremely hard to do — something built with time, effort, and care.
A simple way to say: I was here, I tried hard things, and I love you.
Bitcoin changed how I see time, energy, and value. Watchmaking lets me build those ideas in a physical way.
This is where those two things meet.
Roadmap
The path is simple to describe and hard to do: get precise, build the first movement, improve the craft, then earn the right to attempt more ambitious complications.
- Reach precision on the machines: stable setups, repeatable tolerances, trustworthy processes.
- Build the first prototype: hour, minute, and concentric seconds.
- Learn finishing: surfaces, edges, texture, restraint.
- Learn dial-making: typography, layout, texture, and legibility.
- Implement Bitcoin mechanics: complications that feel real, achievable, and worth building.
- Evolve: refine the movement, the tools, and the ideas over time.
Bitcoin complication ideas
I am especially interested in complications that are mechanically honest — ideas that connect to Bitcoin clearly without feeling gimmicky.
- 10-Minute Wheel: a dedicated wheel completing one rotation per block.
- New Block Repeater: a repeater-style indication inspired by the arrival of a new block.
- Block Time Indicator: a display for position within the current ~10-minute block window.
- Difficulty Epoch Counter: a slow indication of the 2016-block adjustment cycle.
- Block Height Approximation: a very slow-moving expression of chain progress.
- Deadbeat Seconds: one-second ticks that echo discrete events in an otherwise continuous system.
Not trying to make a novelty watch with a Bitcoin logo. Just learning the craft, and trying to build something beautiful and true.
Built slowly. Tested honestly. Improved over years.
On availability
This is not for sale.
Piece uniques. Built slowly, one at a time.
It starts with three pieces, one for each of my daughters.
If I ever make more, same idea: rare, intentional, never mass-produced.
