Topic: A very simple blockchain explorer. - page 2. (Read 20205 times)

Also please check the price. Your site is showing $1233.21. Too good to be true 

This is really awesome work. I really like the candidate block and memory pool


Are the tx actually sorted by fee per bytes ? I see some of the transactions out of order. It would be good if you can display the fee per byte on the right (instead of the tooltip). Also please change unit of fee per byte to satoshis instead of BTC, its easier to read

I have also shared this on reddit to get more community feedback

Unspent transactions are now gold, whereas spent outputs are grey.

learnmebitcoin.com Blockchain Browser - New Version

Hey, spent some time improving the block explorer. Here's an overview:

• Node
  
  • Shows you how many transactions are in the memory pool, how many of those have been selected for inclusion in a candidate block, and the current difficulty (how hard it is to mine it on to the blockchain).

• Blockchain
  
  • View blocks in the blockchain at any part of the chain, along with each block's; size, number of transactions, and fees collected.
  • Example:  The first 10 blocks in the blockchain.
  • Tip: Entering a negative value in the height field will take you that many blocks from the top.

• Block
  
  • See the order of transactions in a block, along with the block header data.
  • Example:  The block of the last block reward halving.
  • Tip: Hovering over the "bits" field in the block header will show you the target value for the block (so you can see how much "under" this block's hash was).

• Transaction
  
  • Shows you the inputs and outputs of a transaction, and the addresses they have been locked to. Allows you to travel through transactions, so you can follow the path of coins.
  • Examples: First ever bitcoin transaction to Hal Finney, Pizza transaction for 10,000 BTC in 2010.
  • Tip: Click on the 'serialized' switch in the top-right corner to see the raw transaction data (along with highlighting of each field when you hover over it).
  • Tip: Click on the lock icons to see the locking scripts used for each transaction. Also, any scripts possibly containing hidden messages have been decoded, such as; the Marry Me message, the original Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks, and these co-ordinates of some sort.

• Address
  
  • View the balance of an address, based on all the outputs that have been locked to that address.
  • Examples:  Silk Road seized funds address (click on the first output to start following where they have been sent), Hi Mom address

Extras

• Memory Pool - See the latest transactions, and which ones have been selected for inclusion in a candidate block (hovering over a transaction tells you the fee per byte, which is the metric used to determine which transactions are selected).
• Candidate Block - This is actually trying to be mined on to the blockchain. It refreshes every 20 seconds to include the transactions with the highest fees. (The lowest fee-per-byte transactions tend to be at the bottom of the block, so by hovering over the bottom one, you can work out the minimum fee-per-byte needed to be included in the next block in the blockchain.)

Thanks. My plan has always been to get the site loading as fast as possible with a clear design first, and then work on a fancy design when that's done. Happy to hear that the site is still workable in its current form, so thanks again.

Glad you like the guide 

Update:

Difficulty Page: http://learnmeabitcoin.com/explorer/node/difficulty/

You can now see how the difficulty changes over time based on the average time it takes for blocks to get mined during that period. It also shows the average time for blocks to be mined up to the current block, so you can anticipate whether the difficulty will go up or down at the next re-target.

The site is working fine on me with current design and it's pretty fast, i personaly like simple design but it will be awesome if this integrate with modern design but it doesn't matter as long the site working properly and usefull i think no problem, anyways i love the guide to me it is quite understandable thanks for making the site

Yes, that's the plan.

I've got some specific idea for how I want the explorer to work, so when I've done what I want to do my plan is to clear up the code and open source the whole thing.

Do you have any ideas for stressing the fact that they are getting spent? I liked the idea of using grey (lack of colour) to try and convey that an output had been "used up", but I'm all for making the page clearer.

I agree that showing the tx value input would be good. I haven't done this yet because I haven't started storing the transactions in my own database. The transactions page uses direct bitcoin-cli queries at the moment, so going through every single input would slow the page down a lot. But yeah, that's no excuse... I just haven't got to that stage yet.

I wasn't sure what colour to use for the outputs initially, but settled on yellow because I thought it resembled gold (i.e. something valuable). I'll have a think about green.

The transaction page is my least favourite at the moment. It has got some way to go, so thanks for the ideas.

Thats actually really neat!

Any chance you going to open-source the explorer?

Jason

Like the branches showing up .

small suggestion

http://learnmeabitcoin.com/explorer/transaction/32a33d5436665ae5e239b616a50a1e1e02972cd75528dbb8bc023a9cc28f565f

Is there anyway the UI can better show tx input so as to stress that they are getting spent? Would be nice to graphically show the value of tx input
Also the grey and yellow color are confusing, as you know people as used to seeing red for tx input and green for output

UPDATES:

1. Branches now show up in the blockchain.

For example:
    
http://learnmeabitcoin.com/explorer/blockchain/423366 <- Here you can see a block (grey outline) that was received after the block that is part of the main chain (nodes add whichever block they receive first on to the top of their chain). No node built on top of this block (grey outline), so nothing came of it. It was just a block that was succesfully mined but never made it in to the chain, because another block was built upon first.

http://learnmeabitcoin.com/explorer/blockchain/423443 <- Here you can see a block (red outline) that was received before the current main block in the chain, so at one time this block was considered part of the main chain, and so all the transactions inside were considered "confirmed". However, a block that was received after this block ended up getting built upon by other nodes in the network, so that other block took its place.

This second situation is interesting, because if a block gets moved out of the main chain, any transactions that aren't also included inside the block that replaces it will go back in to the memory pool so that they can be mined in to a later block. So this is where a transaction gets "confirmed", but then finds itself "de-confirmed" to a re-arrangement of the blockchain.

Therefore...

2. Highlighting transactions in blocks that go back in to the memory pool.

I have also highlighted the transactions in these blocks that end up re-entering the memory pool. Scroll down to the bottom of this block to see a bunch of them: http://learnmeabitcoin.com/explorer/block/0000000000000000013050DB42F93ED72D5DB1EEFB27629F53B3D744DC750B51

It's certainly a long web page.

Where does this cause a problem? Or in other words, what does a shorter page help with?

From my point of view, the page loads quickly, and it's nice to get them straight away without any extra clicks. The scrolling hasn't hindered me.


Is there anything in particular about the current design that makes browsing the site difficult (that those templates solve)?


Thank you.

I think I understand your idea.

I like keeping pages short and using smart symbols (+ tooltips) where possible, but the problem with removing the TXIDs is that I'd lose the ability to find a transaction using the browser's CTRL+f  feature. Shorter pages are pleasant, but CTRL+f is proving to be too useful for me at the moment.

P.S. I think you may have pasted the wrong link (although nonetheless an interesting one )

The interface is too long, and making the page less high or show more. You could think of hiding the tx with this simple JS read more/less script:
http://code-tricks.com/jquery-read-more-less-example/

Integrating a modern design would be a nice addition to your site too:  https://freehtml5.co/page/3/

On a side note, your code is working excellent.

Yeah, on your page http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1389/how-are-public-private-keys-in-an-address-created

Since it is just pages and pages of numbers, so it loses some contextual meaning. If you have a a symbol represent the number, it would shorten up the page and make it easier to look at. You could always tooltip the txid so that if you hovered the mouse over the block, the tx would appear or the other data you have on it. It's cool either way even if you leave it untouched.

Thank you cloverme

I'm interested in your idea, but I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Is the idea to replace each Transaction ID with a symbol?

Fantastic update, that's pretty cool. To save on some screen space, you could shorten that screen up or represent the transaction in the mempool screen by some kind of visual token or something like ▒▒. 

The memory pool now highlights transactions that have been selected for inclusion in the candidate block:

http://learnmeabitcoin.com/explorer/node/memorypool/

Note:

The candidate block on this node/website re-populates every 20 seconds (or when a new block arrives), using the default getblocktemplate command to select transactions from the memory pool.

This may be different to other nodes, who may rebuild their candidate block less frequently, and select transactions differently. So just because you can see your transaction has been included in the candidate block on this node, it doesn't mean that your transaction will definitely make it in to the blockchain when the next block gets mined.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/32892/how-often-do-miners-update-their-block-transaction-list

Not just yet.

I am using Mercurial and pushing to BitBucket, but I haven't shared a link to the repository. It will be open-source, but it's a bit premature at the moment.