Topic: Bitcoin Block Explorer (Read 29682 times)

Yes, please - documented charts, with clearly labeled axes, digit grouping and rounding!

Looking forward, I expect some options to visualize spending networks, and to see well-documented charts indicating the health of the Bitcoin ecosystem

I created a new thread about the blockexplorer.com source code release here:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/blockexplorercom-rewrite-open-sourced-and-on-github-help-wanted-272977

Good to hear the project is still alive. If you hate monopoles, block chain.info is one right now. Support block explorer!

I started rewriting the site's code but got "side tracked" around May with my main job developing TurnKey Linux. We had a release coming out, and I had already devoted more time to blockexplorer than I had originally planned so I had to put the project on the back burner.

Since then a couple of months have passed and I've decided not to delay any longer and just publish the unfinished blockexplorer.com rewrite to GitHub:

http://github.com/lirazsiri/blockexplorer
http://github.com/lirazsiri/blockexplorer-bitcoind

I plan on getting back to this as soon as possible but in the meantime
it'll probably do more good to have the code out there than hidden away
on my hard disk.

Thanks Walter. Yes I am aware of ABE. I'm a Python fan myself and will be looking into it more closely to get some good ideas and also to see if it might be the basis for an eventual rewrite of the existing BBE code.

For the record, BBE has received a total of 287 coins in 164 donations. If we value each donation in USD based on MtGox rates, it amounts to $1,012. The average value of donation was $6.17.


 

Bitcoin is shiny, which makes it valuable to geeks like us.

Welcome, liraz, and good luck to you.  It is spectacular news that BBE will be open source.  I assume you are already aware of ABE, an open-source clone of BBE; this may be an additional source of ideas for cross-pollenization.

Yes, BBE will most definitely be open source, just like TurnKey Linux. I want to bring as many people like you on board. Turn this into a real community project by the Bitcoin community for the Bitcoin community.

Also, I'm really hoping piuk will eventually come around and fully open source blockchain.info (and I mean all of it, not just the wallet) so we can remove the barriers slowing down the mutual exchange of  code and ideas. Besides, he's such an awesome programmer. I'd love to be on the same side with him.

Thank you very much to Theymos, and welcome and good luck to Liraz!  Sounds like BBE is in good hands moving forward

a great read and a positive boost to the community

Thank you so much for making me feel welcome. I'm hoping to live up to this!

Exactly! Bitcoin is just getting started and any endeavour to improve the ecosystem is by no means a zero-sum game.  The way I see it at this stage nearly everyone involved with Bitcoin is basically in the same boat and shares similar a interest - to see Bitcoin succeed. Now that would truly be making history and I already consider myself very lucky to have the opportunity to contribute, however this eventually plays out.

There's a lot of work ahead but I'm hoping the blockexplorer under my stewardship will eventually improve enough to stimulate blockchain.info to improve  and vice versa. We can get a nice cycle of cross fertilization going that will serve the Bitcoin community better than a single tool. We know this is a good model because it's worked so well in other areas (e.g., search engines, browsers, operating systems, Linux distributions). Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that.

Besides, the whole point of Bitcoin is decentralization right? A single online block exploration tool wouldn't really be in the spirit...

Liraz as you are such an open source guy, will BBE be open source? Will you also do charts? I would love to code charts if somebody codes some charts to copy from. I studied maths and have tons of ideas of what would be very interesting to measure if I had the blockchain data readily accessible.

BBE is history, in the best sense of the word.

Looking forward, I expect some options to visualize spending networks, and to see well-documented charts indicating the health of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

As liraz pointed out, there is no need and there is no reason to compete with blockchain.info - there is plenty of room and niches to explore and fill up!

thank you theymos for all you have done...Back in the 2010 days, showing people BBE and tracing through transactions and blocks was the best/only way to show people bitcoin without them having their own client. A lot of us got started that way.

Best of luck to you liraz as well!

When I am at work, where they have a very strict firewall, I cannot access blockchain.info. The webblocker says it is in the category of "gambling". I suspect this is because there is a way to use the blockchain.info wallet to play satoshiDice. Anyway, what I am getting at is it is nice to have blockExplorer as an alternative.

I feel the same way. The community needs more than one site that lets you explore the blockchain. If that's what you mean by competition with blockchain.info then sure, though many a programmer would shudder at the prospect of competing with the godlike piuk - myself included! But BBE doesn't have to compete with blockchain.info on all fronts. I'm not  interested in turning BBE into a competing web wallet, for example. I'm going to have enough on my hands as it is. Besides, do one job and do it well. That's my motto. OK so maybe that's actually the Unix motto but I try to embrace it.

I understand if the Bitcoin community is going to be initially somewhat suspicious of me but that's ok. Trust has to be earned. Also, while I'm not very well known in Bitcoin circles I do have a bit of reputation in the wider world of open source and hopefully at least some of you will be familiar with TurnKey Linux, which I co-founded 5 years ago.

Taking over from theymos is a big responsibility. I definitely have my work cut out for me. I just got access to the site today and my first order of business will be to create a development copy of it I can tinker away at without being petrified that I'll break something and embarrass myself.

I expect it will take a bit of time to get my footing so please be patient with me while I work this out. My immediate goal will be to do some much needed maintenance on the site, fix bugs, improve performance, etc.

I may need to rewrite parts of the site's code to do that but I'll be trying my best to keep full backwards-compatibility with BBE's machine readable API. If something breaks, please let me know.

Why do I care?

I'm hopelessly fascinated by Bitcoin in the technical and political sense and would like to try and do my small part in helping it succeed for the same reasons I care about helping other good open source projects succeed. Also because it's fun, though I guess you have to be a huge geek to appreciate it.

These are basically the same reasons I helped create TurnKey Linux. Speaking of TurnKey I think I can trace back my enthusiasm for Bitcoin to the nightmarishly difficult time we had figuring out a viable way to get companies to pay us for open source support and stuff. TurnKey has users all over the world but when we started out we were way too small to have a merchant account and accept credit cards. PayPal horror stories were terrifying. International wires were very expensive and time consuming to process, not to mention how long you had to wait for them to clear. We eventually just threw up our hands and let Amazon take care of our billing but even then we had to jump through quite a few hoops including setting up a US company, petitioning the US IRS for an EIN (employer identification number) and opening a US bank account just to get them to work with us. For a small non-US based shop, international payments are hard. Hopefully Bitcoin will eventually change all of that one day and I for one will welcome our new blockchain overlords.

Anyhow, once I get the site back on solid footing, I'd like to get everyone's input on how we can continue to improve it to best serve the needs of the Bitcoin community.

Thank you for the years of service you've provided the community in this project.  I've been using BBE for a lot longer than I've been posting here.