Topic: [ANN - IN CONSTRUCTION] PhysiTrack - A General Tracker for Physical Bitcoin (Read 630 times)

I really hope not....
I think people are looking too deep into this... but hey, just my 2 satoshi
Time will tell......

oh...then maybe I am missing the scope/idea of this project... I was under the assumption it is just a  yes/no format that shows if "coin XX" is loaded or unloaded still.

I highly doubt any coin would be worth more just because person "x" owned or held it... seems silly...but what do I know...

And how do you prove ownership of a coin?

You wouldn't be able to prove who owned it, but you could track its sales over time, especially if sold on this forum. Won't make any difference now, but in 30 years? Knowing the provenance of a Casascius I think would be very valuable. Ie. Forum user x bought direct from Mike, who sold it two Y, who is now selling it. Provenance makes other collectibles worth a lot more, especially if owned by someone notable....which I'm sure you will be in bitcoin history 50 years from now MJ!

I want to be able to track a coin over time though.....see when it sold, who to etc. Get an idea of its provenance. Know its history. An mj owned coin will eventually be more valuable than some random coin with no history!

I think that could be pretty easy to automate, you would need some tricks for distinguishing keys from other numbers like dates and block heights and stuff people put in photos. The biggest issue would probably be cost....because the keys are usually small relative to the picture, the Cloud API probably wouldn't work, although I'll check to see. You would have to run a custom algorithm that zooms in on the coin....doable, but probably very expensive to do in the cloud.

The first step would probably be to do a quick and dirty scrape and see how many were missing addresses, and go from there. This shit will only get easier and cheaper to do though, the stuff you can do with AWS now is lightyears ahead of where they where even a year ago.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rekognition/latest/dg/detect-labels-console.html

If you're looking for posted Bitcoin addresses, it's quite easy to find. If you have to get the information from images, I don't know how to automate that.

That solves it

You won't need more than 6 confirmations. If that gets rewinded, we have much bigger problems

hmmmm..... that could be a fun ML problem for someone to solve. Start with Collectibles, hand label the first 50 pages or so, see what it spits out, it's the kind of structured data it might work well on, especially with [auction] and [wts] labels already exisiting, then numeric bids and offers, almost always with a PK in the first post.

You could probably do a pretty good job just with a basic python script to be honest, especially if you added a "Report Mistake" button to the website, so you could effectively crowd source the labeling problem.

Ouf so that's about 230++GB of data left to process then, so definitely not four more days -- but good to see you're at least already at the 2016 mark, right about the time I got my first proper BTC anyway! Keep us posted!


This is one such full public address from this thread: 1Btc1qJg2gQmbFFjBbNs1LwgFQ3VyLoYgG suggests it's a vanity one, and from this batch of all beginning with "1Btc"

This one has a partial address starting with "12CBvVtq..."

I wonder if you've tried contacting the user smoothie. They do say in a previous post they stopped funding the coins after early 2014!

That'd be interesting, but I cannot think of a efficient way to extract all the useful info from that dump.

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Thanks a lot for pointing that out !!

Well, no. I haven't thought about it, but I have a simple kinda "quick & dirty" fix :
Process all blocks until : It can be 12, or even 144.

Our routine to calculate the balance of each physical will most likely be updated once every 24hr;
I don't think it is a big issue for the tracker to be constantly 24hr behind.

I still haven't finished downloading all Bitcointalk posts, but if it helps, I can share what I have. It's currently around 60 GB and it takes about half a year to collect all data from the forum (with 1 request per forum).

Have you considered what's going to happen to your database if you process a new block that orphans afterwards?

Thanks everyone for your kind words.

Yes, it is very interesting !

There are many physical Bitcoins that are unfunded, but also there are many that are funded and there is only a few trackers that are very specific to one kind of item.

4 more days coming ... Well ...
Our script is parsing the whole dataset of Bitcoin Core's blockchain.
This is where we are at (just checked now) :


As blocks got completely full at around block #400,000; the process became much more lenghtly.
1000 blocks means that 1GB of data was processed. I'm not sure how to enhance the performances.

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Thanks !
I will reach out to you, maybe you can give us a couple advise ? That'd be great.

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Thanks for pointing this thread ! Yes, absolutely.
We have access to Blockchair's data-dumps with an API key. They do a lot of them !

However Magnat's task was to find a way to come up with one of these dumps, and this is what we're compiling as of now.
Actually, that's why it displays balances for Coldkeys.
I gave him Blockchair's dump and a list of Coldkeys and asked him to retrieve the amounts from the dump.
We do it step by step.

When all the existing blocks will be processed, we'll have the state of all addresses "in-use" and their "balances" in BTC's blockchain.
We will process new blocks on the fly to always have an up-to-date state of addresses.
This data is precious and I can already think of more uses for it when the parsing is complete.

But yeah, this tracker will function only with our in-house tools.

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Thanks for the great ressource !
Magnat's been compiling many makers lists for now and will continue to do so, among other things.

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Thanks Sky !
Yeah... I'm not sure how to figure that out.

Can someone share a Lealana BTC coin public address ?
Maybe we can figure it out by following the trails in the blockchain but without a proper list it's going to be tough.

Awesome project guys, just found you from LoyceV's merit list, so dumped my spare ones at you. I think it's a really interesting project, and collectors would love this but, my question is: aren't many physical Bitcoins anyway unfunded? That was my assumption anyway, I have bought the odd collectible or so, but only to give away to others as gifts so I don't myself own any now but I recall everything I'd ever bought as unfunded.

So how does that work with this project? Still awesome anyway and I'm looking forward, 15 days means it's 4 more days coming!

@OP How could you never have had a forum account before!? But welcome =)

Check this out:  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/list-of-all-bitcoin-addresses-with-a-balance-5254914

Thanks everyone for your welcome and for all this positivity and enthusiasm with regard to this project ! it motivates us even more to lead this project to the end

We're going to take in count all your feedbacks and will add as many feature we can to make it the ultimate physical tracker you need !

@MoparMiningLLC actually our balance database is empty, only some coldkey got a balance value that is not empty but it's for debug purpose so do not worry about it !

I found my satori there and it had the right address but the wrong balance - I assume as this is still a work in progress that it will change to show the correct balance when you are finished.

That's some good shit right there.
Surely needed a all in one physical tracker.


Definitely true! there's no record of lealana coins, so if this can help with that, it's gonna be golden.
though it still won't show the unloaded coins address.

Damn Yoggy you really have been a busy bee of late, continuing to surprise us with awesome stuff left and right.  Kind of surprised you didn't ask me to take up the coding project here though  . 

Is there any plans to do the final version in English? I think this would be ideal being that some browsers suck at translating and others like say Duck Duck don't even offer the option. 

Random thought..Any chance you could add Satori custom chips?  Bitflyer, OmiseGo, Zaif, and MissBitcoin Japan being the customs made in "bulk" that I know of.. I can provide at least one address or first keys for each set.  We could then track down on the blockchain how many were made of each pretty easily no? FYI Moto ( Satori owner/founder) will not give us the addresses as he wouldn't even tell us how many of each were made for these exchanges. 

another thing I thought of was giving users the ability to take a pic of the coin and upload it, add their PGP key, or forum name etc. Lot of privacy issues etc, could very well be a horrible terrible no-good idea, but thought I would throw it out there

a very good site, which will make a lot of things easier for collectors.
here you have now all collections at a glance and can access your personal "collections" very quickly
respect, thumbs up and the merits are on the way 

welcome to the forum by the way

Wow, looks great already !
Definitely got one hell of a job on your hands !!
If this could be the ultimate guide/reference site then it would be a remarkable achievement  
Thankyou and fingers crossed that it’s doable