A very simple blockchain explorer.

[freemanjackal]

you have made great job so far, the site is fast and very functional. i just have a question, a doubt from searching blocks in your site. the first blocks dont collected any fees, when was that this started, to become a common practice. was  this always meant to be?

[tobasco]

you have made great job so far, the site is fast and very functional. i just have a question, a doubt from searching blocks in your site. the first blocks dont collected any fees, when was that this started, to become a common practice. was  this always meant to be?

Thank you.

Yes, that is correct, the first blocks did not collect any fees.

This is because fees are used as an incentive for miners to include transactions in to a block. For example, if a miner can only fit 1000 transactions in to a block, and there are 2000 transactions in the memory pool, the miner will select the top 1000 transactions with the highest fees. So if you want to ensure that your transaction gets mined quickly, you should add a juicy fee to it.

However, at the start of bitcoin there were not a lot of transactions, which meant that you didn't have to compete with other transactions for space in a block. Therefore, you could send a transaction with 0 fees, and a miner would probably include it in a block anyway.

Fees started being collected from blocks when there was more competition to get in to a block, and people started adding fees to their transactions.

[tobasco]

New Tool: Find connections between addresses.

• Address Path

This tool will show you if there is a connection between two addresses.

It's very basic at the moment, but I think it could be very useful, so thought I would share it while I work on it.

Example:

Here's a post on Reddit about tracking the movement of Mt Gox stolen coins. I haven't fully read the analysis, but you can use the tool to see that there is a connection between the two addresses mentioned at the top of the post:

1AYtnRppWM7tWQaVLpm7TvcHKrjKxgCRvX and 1KLahQtqDNAXvrjNyfvgSBtAhwco5ZxLp4

[johhnyUA]

Hmmm, I will necessarily learn this blockexplorer more attentively. There is many interesting functions in it, i hope everything works fine and correct.

But it will be good to add some more functions like hashrate of the chain (maybe also make options "depend by country" ).

[tobasco]

Hmmm, I will necessarily learn this blockexplorer more attentively. There is many interesting functions in it, i hope everything works fine and correct.

But it will be good to add some more functions like hashrate of the chain (maybe also make options "depend by country" ).

Thanks.

Can you explain more about what you mean by "hashrate of the chain"? I have a page that shows you the difficulty: http://learnmeabitcoin.com/browser/node/difficulty/ - are you looking for something different?

By "depend by country", do you mean something like showing the time based on a country's timezone (and not just GMT)?

[freemanjackal]

i didnt know that about fees, i assumed this was from the beginning of btc,that's why tx without fees take so long to get confirmations, just when there aren't enough tx is that they are included, good to know, thanks for the explanation, i understood very well

[johhnyUA]

Hmmm, I will necessarily learn this blockexplorer more attentively. There is many interesting functions in it, i hope everything works fine and correct.

But it will be good to add some more functions like hashrate of the chain (maybe also make options "depend by country" ).

Thanks.

Can you explain more about what you mean by "hashrate of the chain"? I have a page that shows you the difficulty: http://learnmeabitcoin.com/browser/node/difficulty/ - are you looking for something different?

By "depend by country", do you mean something like showing the time based on a country's timezone (and not just GMT)?

Here - https://blockchain.info/ru/charts/hash-rate . It's not a difficulty as you see. It's statistic about how many mining pools (or mining devices) used in bitcoin chain. (can be used for assessment in mining)
Depend by country - depend hashrate by country ) But i think it's very hard to do, maybe impossible.
 

[tobasco]

Update: Path Tool

This tool finds connections between bitcoin addresses.

• This update makes it much faster. It should now be able to connect any two addresses, no matter how complex.
• As a result, it should be effective enough for light forensics on the movement of bitcoins between addresses.

[blacknerd]

Hi, excellent website which i found useful.

Are you able to categorize the website because it it being blocked at work

[tobasco]

Hi, excellent website which i found useful.

Are you able to categorize the website because it it being blocked at work

I can try!

I'm not sure what I need to do to categorize the website though. Do you know how I would go about doing this?

[tobasco]

Learn Me a Bitcoin: Update:

Been working on improving the blockchain explorer over the last few months.

Goal

My aim is to create a fast, lightweight, and easy-to-use blockchain explorer.

Here are some new features:

Node:

This page has stayed about the same. However, it now displays the time since the last block was mined:



Blockchain:

• Visual display of time between blocks that have been mined, along with tooltip to show the time.
• Miner is shown next to each block, along with a tooltip of the full coinbase scriptSig.

Block:

• Clicking on the Version field takes you to a page that shows you the bits being used for signalling.
• Clicking on the Bits field takes you to a page that shows you how the target has been represented in the compact nBits format.

Transaction:

• Now shows output values by default. Should have done this a long time ago, but hey ho, it's there now.

Segwit:

Added a bunch of icons to Segwit transactions so that you can spot them when you are browsing through the memory pool or through blocks.

Download:

You can now download entire raw blocks or transactions:



(scroll to bottom)

General:

• The site is generally much faster.
• The latest transactions are tracked much more quickly. So if you make a transaction, you should be able to find it in this blockchain explorer about 1 second after it has been relayed to my node.

As always, I'm open to ideas for improvements  

[tobasco]

Quick Update:

Just a couple of changes that might be helpful:

Blockchain

Blocks in the blockchain show how "full" they are. So for example, if you're browsing through the blockchain you can easily spot the empty blocks:



Transactions

The inputs and outputs of a transaction are sized based on their value. This makes it easier to follow the path of large amounts of bitcoins:


Merry Christmas.

Greg.

[Bloody Mary]

I'm getting "Couldn't connect to bitcoin .. when I click on a block for some reasons ? 

[RobertPaulig]

Can someone explain it to me? On this page https://learnmeabitcoin.com/glossary/private-key you say that:

A private key can be almost any 256-bit number.
When you create a public key, your private key is put through a special mathematical function, and this function can only handle numbers up to just below 256 bits. The maximum value is:

max = 115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494337
So when you generate a 256 bit number, you will want to check that it's below this maximum value.

But 2^256 is 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936

You can easily verify this
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2%5E256

[manu2]

Can someone explain it to me? On this page https://learnmeabitcoin.com/glossary/private-key you say that:

A private key can be almost any 256-bit number.
When you create a public key, your private key is put through a special mathematical function, and this function can only handle numbers up to just below 256 bits. The maximum value is:

max = 115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494337
So when you generate a 256 bit number, you will want to check that it's below this maximum value.

But 2^256 is 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936

You can easily verify this
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2%5E256

The number of private keys are limited by the secp256k1 Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithm. It is the "n" value listed here https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Secp256k1

If you want to understand better how this work programmatically, you should see this very nice explanatory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB3HcPgm_FI