Bitcoin Forum

else's ?  I know you can see your own balance in the client itself ...

I've heard of blockexplorer   but don't know how to read it - is it possibly to put someones payment address and see how many bitcoins they have?

Thanks!

Good question, I'm wondering the same thing.

I don't believe it can be done. Unless you has access to their wallet.dat

Thanks I don't feel like such a noob! ;D

btw: nice service if its yours http://bitcoinvert.com/   been looking for something like this!

ohhh ....obviously, that won't happen..

I'm wondering as well.

The answer is http://blockexplorer.com.  For example to check how many bitcoins I received: http://blockexplorer.com/q/getreceivedbyaddress/1FFkqPxUwp4CBJ24RDvikhGRQtaiWDYWEv

Explore blockexplorer.com very useful site. ^_^

With this you can only see how many bitcoins went to that particular account. And if they have been spent. But every user has many accounts (addresses), so you don't know how many BTC one particular user has.

That is sufficient, every has the right to privacy, after all you don't everybody to know which addresses are tied to you, ey?

[bump]

I guess this is the only answer?

I wanted to know the answer to this myself.  Blockexplorer has a way to view the current balance of an address, i.e. payments to minus payments out of an address.

Query looks like the following: http://blockexplorer.com/q/addressbalance/1Fm7bWSVuVAAZQu8J3YkbXaeUoVMdhJat8 (http://blockexplorer.com/q/addressbalance/1Fm7bWSVuVAAZQu8J3YkbXaeUoVMdhJat8)

Note as mentioned above, it is difficult to know the balance of a person, as you would have to know all the bitcoin addresses they control.  Hence this is probably the closest answer to your question with minimum of effort.

You can't see anyboy elses balace because one can have generate an unlimited number of bitcoin addresses for each wallet.dat.
You can see in blockexplorer every bitcoin which moved to which address, but you cannot know which address belongs to which wallet.dat.

For example I have a wallet.dat but I generate address a, b and c. If I move money between a and b or c, then my wallet.dat still have the same amount of money since all these are my own adressen. But for another person which only knows my adress a it looks as if I transferred my money to another account.

hi,

not exactly...
if you know the public address of a wallet you can estimate the amount of its bitcoin balance.
and if you know every public address of the wallet then you know the bitcoin balance.

like this...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Apjfkh4baK_FdHVuS3NPaDRmNGhpQmFmcGpfV2cxVGc

The key phrase here is, "if you know every public address of the wallet".

Not only is it unlikely that anyone would give you every address they use, they might even have more than one wallet. Or use e-wallets. Or keep some BTC in an exchange, mining pool, or other BTC based site that allows you to create an account for your coins.

It gets even worse when you consider that people can (and I'm sure some actually do) transfer bitcoins by simply transferring private keys. In theory, you might send someone funds, and they don't even move from the address, but ownership and possession still gets transferred.

http://blockchain.info, just enter your address in the search field.

But if you do that you have to trust the one who gave you his priv key, because he could have a copy of it enabling him to spend the coins too. So it's not a very safe way and i doubt many people are using this method.

Yeah, I can't imagine it's very common; I'd think it would likely only be with people who trust each other significantly.

But then, you never know. Casascius publicly advertises his physical bitcoins; someone could claim they do the same on occasion for a few folks, and as long as the private keys aren't kept in a wallet they frequently use, one couldn't prove that they hadn't done this.