Bitcoin Forum

I created a site that lets you view detailed information about Bitcoin blocks, addresses, and transactions.

http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/bbe/

This data is all gotten from the block chain. It has always been possible to get this data, but you had to patch Bitcoin with getblock or use the clunky -printblock switch in Bitcoin, and then you had to search through miles of data to get what you wanted. Now everything is available in a clickable and easily-searchable format.

Some highlights:

- The genesis block (http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/bbe/block/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f), which is included with every version of Bitcoin. If you click the only transaction (http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/bbe/tx/4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b) in this block (the generation transaction), you will see that the "genesis coins" have not yet been spent ("not yet redeemed" in "outputs").

- 198.99 BTC has been donated (http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/bbe/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt) to the EFF since a Bitcoin address was added to their site. (As of this writing. Hopefully more will be added.)

- Bitcoin Faucet has sent and received a ton of transactions (http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/bbe/address/15VjRaDX9zpbA8LVnbrCAFzrVzN7ixHNsC). Because of the way change works in Bitcoin, the total balance on this page is not the actual Faucet balance, and this page does not represent all Faucet transactions.

- Surprisingly, the three transactions with unknown "to" addresses in this block (http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/bbe/block/00000000000997f9fd2fe1ee376293ef8c42ad09193a5d2086dddf8e5c426b56) are the only non-standard transactions in the block chain. The repeated OP_CHECKSIG commands cause everyone downloading the block chain to do extra cryptography -- the bug that allowed this transaction to be included is now fixed, but these old transactions still exist.

- 50 BTC has already been donated (http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/bbe/address/1Cvvr8AsCfbbVQ2xoWiFD1Gb2VRbGsEf28) to BBE, even though I hadn't officially announced it yet. Thanks! If you click on the transaction (http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/bbe/tx/5ad984358bd5da0cae3245f49a190306e720d57c7b3e1f30d2ddafe763269c0c#o0) and follow it back one transaction (http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/bbe/tx/dafaa8f636af875aad504a62d3c861b3d57b65ac512cd8559fe5c170ffdd2938#o0), you can see that the coin used to donate to me was a generation from January 2010.

- Following one of the addresses (http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/bbe/address/1Get6qiRbL8GocANrrYyfkTDNtButzvcFb) used by a scammer (according to BuyBitcoins (http://buybitcoins.com/)), you can get all of the addresses that ever received coins from this address:
1PwQfGPUFfuqqsmqpg8GegKziMV5Y3qfyr
18oCRAYcQEFbgm7nUCnJ7CqfgYxrhj9Des
16Fdg74JrkWogNDLDM8FJS1k5QrKAouBts
12cPg8VXSL3R3GnphKbpabC14S1sZXbsmU
19w4JEHG2fjVkEeheLSQNTZmmj81KvSzK7
If you own one of these addresses, then maybe you can identify this scammer. This list is only going one level deep -- it's also possible to find a list of every address that received "stolen coins" from the original address, possibly through multiple levels.

I hope BBE will be useful and informative. One of my main motivations for creating it was to inform people of the exact limitations of Bitcoin's anonymity -- it's possible to remain anonymous, but only if you're careful.

As a non-programmer, I like this. I can see how my transactions are not 100% anonymous.

I'd like to re-visit that bitcoin laundromat...

This is amazing.

A question. When you send coins and get change both addresses are listed, are they listed in the same order every time? Is it random, or alphabetical...

When I sell something on BiddingPond and post the address to pay to in the listing, this would help verify payment was sent.

Thanks for the donation and nice comments!

I just noticed a bug, which I won't be able to fix today: the type of transaction listed after "Sent" or "Received" on address pages is wrong.


The order is randomized when sent. BBE shows them in an unspecified order on address and block pages (I might change this), but it preserves the block's ordering on transaction pages.

Cool, thanks. It's sometimes "obvious" like in the recent block 846.63 = 826.63 + 20, but you can't rely on that for arrests, etc. Well, i guess you could...

So are listed balances correct, but the faucet is off because it uses/used multiple addresses or something? Can you elaborate on the change issue you mentioned?

I made it so inputs/outputs are always listed in the order they appear in blocks.


Most of the faucet's balance is stored in addresses created when sending change. Here (http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/bbe/tx/34754220d68b7b3be6d414592d6cd15d8bc17b4d085847e256a78b83ad258282#i170814) you can see that it sent 0.5 to someone, and then sent back to a new address (http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/bbe/address/1TQv3f6Qk2H5dskQpi7St6TbnsTQXbXZu) - this new address does the same thing, and the new address from that transaction does the same thing, etc. You can also see the ordering randomization from this chain of transactions.

Oh, duh. I get it. They just don't bother to re-aggregate in to one address all the time.

A "total received by this address" would be cool.

Thanks theymos, this was much needed. I sent you some bitcoins for your efforts :)

Will you be releasing the source? Or maybe just giving access to your processed data in a nice format? I'd like to try to make some GraphViz charts (for example, being able to graph all transactions to/from a certain address given a maximum depth - that sort of thing).

Thanks!

I will not release the source unless there is a lot of demand for it. It is written specifically for BBE, and it would probably not be very useful for learning about Bitcoin or making similar things. For example, my getblock->SQL script does a bunch of unnecessary and redundant work in order to create database tables that can be efficiently accessed by BBE.

Here are the PHP base58/address functions that I wrote for this project, though:
http://pastebin.com/vmRQC7ha

I will offer data (maybe for a small fee). What format would be useful?

I'm suggesting you do this, but it just occurred to me that you could add the ability to put notes on everything wiki style.

Comments about addresses especially. This could be useful for sharing information while investigating scams and such. Plus it would just be fun to sift through all the labels people put on stuff, like I was wondering how much the mtgox donation addy got, I think I found it from my transaction history, but I don't know for sure, or if he had a different one up previously, etc.

I was thinking about that, too, but it seems to me that any comments would get lost in the gigantic sea of pages. If I see a lot of "look at this cool thing on BBE!" posts on the forum, I will implement this.

I can think of a few ways to fix that.

There could be a page of new comments.

It could also be searchable. So if there was a taabl controversy searching "taabl" would bring up a list of relevant addresses.

Anyway, just thinking aloud. It is very useful as it is.

Done.


Fixed. It was actually only "Sent" that was broken.

This is a generally awesome tool.  In addition to it's other uses, it will allow us to keep Mybitcoin.com and it's (presumedly less honest) future competitors from the temptation of fractional reserve nonsense.  Just the threat that any Joe can run his addresses past block explorer and tell if his funds have been mixed with other accounts not his own, or otherwise borrowed without consent, should be enough to keep most on the up-and-up.  Not that I don't have a fair trust of Mybitcoin.com, I do have an account that has been climbing in value as of late, but I also feel better knowing that I can check on my balances without having to trust the websites' honesty itself.

How does that work? You send coins to an address they gave you, then request a few back and the change goes elsewhere. Do they then send the change back to the address you know?

How does what work?  Fractional reserve or auditing them with block explorer?

If you mean, how does one audit your addresses with block explorer, simply check the addresses that you have to make sure that there have been no transactions that you didn't do yourself and that the address balances add up to what you should have.  If you have more than what you should have, then the website is sharing accounts among users and tracking the individual values internally.  Which would allow the website owner to loan out portions of the pooled balance, much like how fractional reserve banks do now, since they don't actually keep your money on hand.  If there has been any transactions in or out of said accounts that you didn't perform, then that means the website owner is using member accounts to "float" his own activities.

EDIT:  Except I can't actually see all of the addresses used in my Mybitcoin.com account.  That's going to be something I need to ask for.

hmmm, has this ever been possible?

It seems like mybitcoin, bitcoinmarket, mtgox etc. all use a shared wallet to store deposits, and make withdrawals.  Accounts are kept straight through a separate accounting system.  Thus you cannot be guaranteed that your BTC deposit isn't immediately -- and legitimately -- withdrawn by someone else.

Bitcoin shares balances among addresses, so you'd have to modify Bitcoin to achieve this separation.

I imagine that there will be a push for separated accounts and/or wallets in future competitors of Mybitcoin.  Although I understand why they do it this way, I don't think that an online wallet management website should use a pooled system.  It's a bit different for the markets, as there is no implication that the wallet is your's.

I had made the assumption that they already had.  One client with one wallet.dat would be fine if the client was modified for multiple independent users, and sets of addresses were linked to a user and not assumed to be one person.  That's a very Windoze like mentality.  For that matter, there should be a GNU/Linux version that plays nice with multi-user systems, where the wallet.dat is in the user's disk space.

Hey theymos, jsut discovered your awesome tool.
If you feel like releasing the source, it'll be very appreciated =)

Thanks theymos, this is a great tool. I've been playing with the idea myself, but I'm happy you were faster :-)

There is now a version of BBE that runs on the test network:
http://theymos.ath.cx:64150/testnet/bbe/

It's a very handy tool.

It would be good (for me at least) if there was a field in the "Block" view that gave the length of the block in bytes. It would be nice to have a size column which gives the transaction size in bytes and a priority column which shows the priority as calculated using the recently implemented formula.(Priority no sooo important to me at the moment though.)

On the "From" and "To" columns it would be nice to see the "balance" associated with that public key before the transaction so that a coinbase transaction would say for 91812
16va6NxJrMGe5d2LP6wUzuVnzBBoKQZKom:0 +50 = 50
and the other transaction would show as

777ed67c58... 0 1BFrS5LQSTY... : 1 -1 = 0 16QjxpGVX6EF... : 19 -19 = 0   1MCwBbhNGp5hR...: 411.9 +20 = 431.9

You can imagine that it's handy to have this info at block level without having to drill down to transaction or address level.

Also, it would be very interesting to have a list of unspent addresses and their balances. Obviously this total should add up to the currentblocknumber*50

If you wanted to be a hero you could work out how much space could be recovered from the block chain by removing spent transactions and stubbing the merkle tree down as much as possible. I suspect it wouldn't be much at the moment.

If you wanted a tougher task and be a real hero you could create a graph of bitcoin transactions with each address being a node and each transaction being a directed edge. You could display the thickness of the edges as being the number of transactions or the total value and see how many isolated graphs the transactions fall into.

The last two are harder more long term projects but the block page changes would be very handy for me in the short term.

Thanks theymos

ByteCoin
 

 

BBE and Real-Time Stats are now at a more easy-to-remember location:
http://blockexplorer.com/
http://blockexplorer.com/testnet/
http://blockexplorer.com/q/

All old links should redirect to the equivalent page at the new domain. Tell me if any links fail to do so.

And now HTTPS, too:
https://blockexplorer.com/

A+

Data sizes are now shown for transactions and blocks.

Awesome, theymos! Thanks for that.

It'll be handy to see during the next spam flood.

ByteCoin

HTTPS access to http://blockexplorer.com/q and the rest of BBE will be offline for 2-5 days starting a few days from now. If anything uses the tools over HTTPS, change it ASAP or prepare to have your packets rejected for a few days.

(I'm making some hardware+software changes that require me to move BBE to a different computer temporarily, and I don't want to move the private key for security reasons.)

BBE now publishes RSS feeds for addresses. Your browser should be showing you an RSS option on all address pages. Should I include a human-readable link, too, you think?

This is useful for tracking your own transactions without having to run the client or log into your e-wallet. You can also get emailed about your transactions by using one of the many RSS-to-email providers.

The feed shows the last 20 received transactions, with the newest transactions first. Sends are not shown since they are mostly uncontrollable. The links all point to the address page right now -- eventually I will have them highlight the specific transaction on that page.

There are now Real-Time Stats tools for the testnet, too:
http://blockexplorer.com/testnet/q

Now is a good time to mention that testnet BBE will not automatically switch to a new chain if anyone attempts to replace the entire chain, but will stop updating until I switch it over manually. (This is to prevent mainline blocks from being lost in case an attacker finds a way to destroy all Bitcoin clients' block databases.)

I mentioned this a while ago on IRC, but hardly anyone seems to be using it:
http://blockexplorer.com/q/nethash/144

Possibly I need to explain the columns:
- blockNumber: Each row looks at a section of blocks (the section size is specified by the query parameter). This is the latest block included in the section. So the section includes data from the last row's blockNumber+1 up to this blockNumber. The first row looks back to block 1.
- time: Unix time at blockNumber.
- target: Full decimal target at blockNumber.
- difficulty: Difficulty at blockNumber.
- hashesToWin: Average number of hashes required to solve a block at blockNumber's difficulty.
- avgIntervalSinceLast: The average number of seconds between each block in the section.
- netHashPerSecond: Number of hashes the network is doing per second in this section. Calculated by comparing avgIntervalSinceLast to hashesToWin.

This data can be used to make a very nice graph of network power and difficulty.

wow, that's a bitcoin data gold mine.

I know people here have put great faith on bitcoin's ability of preventing double-spending, or creating coins out of thin air, because that's one of the cornerstone of this currency and the foundation of bitcoin's value.

But as a paranoid person as I am, I feel much more comfortable if there's a way to independently count (or estimate) the total amount bitcoins in circulation, without relying on 50 btc x (# of blocks) calculation. -- i.e. can we look at all blocks, add up all the amount flowing into recipient addresses, then subtract whatever flows out of these addresses, and get the total amount of bitcoin in circulation?

This way, if there's some evil government or evil scientist finds a way bypassing the double-spending prevention mechanism, they will have to expose themselves via block chain data.

It checks out on my database:

My database updating script will refuse to accept a double-spend, though I doubt I will catch something that Bitcoin itself doesn't.

Thanks. Looks this is what I've been looking for. I don't quite understand your table definition though. Does "WHERE inputs IS NULL" restrict result only to coin-generation transactions?

It eliminates spent outputs. The total value of unspent outputs should equal the total BTC in circulation (as it does).

The LEFT JOIN matches each output with the input that spent it. If inputs IS NULL for a row, then the output is unspent.

I intend to release my getblock-to-SQL script at some point in the far future, since it allows easy access to stats like this. It's much too messy right now, though.

This is really cool, knowing this, I'll be able to sleep much better. thanks a bunch.

The format of http://blockexplorer.com/q/nethash has changed. It needed built-in explanatory text, I think. The averages for rows that occur on a retarget are hopefully improved now, also. (I noticed that it was severely off when the most recent retarget showed 900+ ghash/s...)

http://blockexplorer.com/testnet is now using the new testnet.

New Real-Time Stats page:
http://blockexplorer.com/q/mytransactions

It allows you to get all transactions for given addresses. This could be used to make a simple Bitcoin client.

Examples:
http://blockexplorer.com/q/mytransactions/1Cvvr8AsCfbbVQ2xoWiFD1Gb2VRbGsEf28
Dumps all transactions for 1Cvv...

http://blockexplorer.com/q/mytransactions/1Cvvr8AsCfbbVQ2xoWiFD1Gb2VRbGsEf28/0000000000034b1d01d6296f7f6f46d3ba4e6cb358b8eb74d5ff7ff492e4e23a
Dumps all transactions for 1Cvv... since block 34b1...

http://blockexplorer.com/q/mytransactions/1Cvvr8AsCfbbVQ2xoWiFD1Gb2VRbGsEf28.1NXYoJ5xU91Jp83XfVMHwwTUyZFK64BoAD
Dumps all transactions for 1Cvv... and 1NXY...

The page has good support for If-None-Match, so it can be polled without using much bandwidth.

Right now only address transactions are shown, since that's all you'll usually want, but I could support all transaction types if there is a demand.

Would you consider setting up BBE for namecoin's block chain?

If you are not interested in doing so, would you release the source so someone else could host it?

thanks!

As I've said before in other threads, I believe Namecoin will inevitably fail because its economic model is broken. So I won't support it.


I don't want to make my code public now. Maybe later.

I don't think mybitcoin.com really works the way you think it does. I think it actually is just one big pool so far as bitcoin is concerned. mybitcoin.com then keeps its own database of accounts. afaik

Some people have been concerned about powerful pools with >50% of the CPU power, so I added a log of reorg events:
http://blockexplorer.com/q/reorglog

If someone with a lot of CPU tries to reverse transactions, it will appear in that log as several sequential blocks being replaced. A few non-sequential replacements now and then are normal.

That's just awesome. Thank you !

that is awesome! 

theymos, i assume ur monitoring this regularly (several times a day?) and would let us all know?

He'd sell his coins first but then yes, he'd let us all know :)

This is extremely useful. All it needs is a dedicated website "Block Watch" and a alert level associated with it :)

Thank you for providing this.

Super !
Maybe display them in reverse chronological so the most recent are on top ?

Now THAT is a good idea.  Even clever name.

I am not monitoring it. BBE will automatically stop updating if 5 or more blocks are replaced, though, and I will know about this event. (There is not yet any warning on the main BBE page after this happens, though I'll probably add one sometime in the future.)


You can make such a site, polling my page. Don't increase the alert level at all for a single replaced block. Increase it in an exponential way for each replaced block after one.

Polling quirk: if 5 or more blocks are replaced, the reorglog page will not log all five replacements. Instead, one replacement will be logged and then the last line will be:

The alert level should increase when BBE is down, since it would be easy for an attacker to take down my site. However, my uptime has not been incredible in the past, so it should maybe only increase slowly in such a case...


I don't feel like redoing all of my testing of this to reverse the order. Logs are traditionally in chronological order, anyway.

Is this the same method being used on you site?
  http://blockexplorer.com/q/totalbc

I hope you can consider providing these service to function as an early warning system for the bitcoin network.

It's not.

The value returned with the SQL is now actually less than the "ideal" number, as some miners have thrown away block reward BTC. I might make a /q page for it eventually, as the difference is interesting.

It only one block (#124724) that doesn't balance this way so far. He was intending to throw away 0.00000001 BTC but accidentally also dropped a fee of 0.01 BTC so he made 0.01000001 BTC in all disappear. Of course its not really any different effect than someone losing their wallet.dat file. The value is gone either way.
For reporting purposes it could be credited to a special "lost" account address.

Abe (http://abe.john-edwin-tobey.org/) now supports totalbc but reports the measured number (e.g., 7017349.98999999) rather than the "ideal" value BBE gives.  I do not plan to implement totalbc for future blocks (http://blockexplorer.com/q/totalbc/99999999).

http://abe.john-edwin-tobey.org/chain/Bitcoin/q/totalbc

The network provider for the server reports that there will be an outage from 5 PM to 6 PM Central US time on the 20^th for maintenance.

I don't know what you would do with this information, but I thought I'd pass it on...

Looks like a bug:
 - https://blockexplorer.com/q/bcperblock/209999

Returns:
25.00000000

Should be 50.  The block with block height 210000 is the first at 25.

Why aren't they anonymous? I entered a random address of mine (which I have received btc on) to view the details, but there was nothing that I didn't already know was public (the address, amount and time).

Fixed. I think this happened because I wrote that page a very long time ago when Bitcoin's getblockcount actually returned a count of the total number of blocks instead of the max block number.

This is not quite finalized yet, but I am planning on selling Bitcoin Block Explorer to Liraz Siri (http://liraz.org/). I really would have liked to have kept running it, but as you've undoubtedly noticed I have not been able to add any new features to BBE or even fix bugs (such as the long-broken search feature) due to lack of time. Liraz seems trustworthy and genuinely interested in the project, so I feel pretty good about selling the site to him.

Previously I said that access logs would not be kept for longer than 30 days. I will no longer have control over that, though I will make sure that logs from before the sale are deleted.

Thanks for your support.

Hey BBE was great. It was the first and is now totally overrun by blockchain.info. I hope that Liraz Siri is genuinely interested in competing with blockchain.info so we don't slide into a monopoly situation.

Yes, that's one reason I'm selling it. Even if I devoted all of my time to BBE, I doubt I could compete with piuk. He's superhuman!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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...

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

a great read and a positive boost to the community :D

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

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.

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.

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

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.

https://i.imgur.com/92fnBfs.png
 

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.

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.

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

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

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=272977

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

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