(Experimental) pident — a pool-biased blockchain representation

[Artefact2]

Hello there. This thread is about pident, a pool-aware, opensource Blockexplorer-like tool.

Main features

• Pool-related functionality: browse blocks found by a certain pool, show the list of blocks with the pools that found them and see the pools' sizes relative to the whole network.
  
  
• See detailed information about any address, transaction or block: just like you would with another Blockexplorer-like tool.
  
  
• Full tonal compatibility: pident can operate in decimal or in tonal mode. You choose which one you preffer.
  
  

Other features

• Factoids: not-so-useful interesting statistics about the blockchain, like the block with the biggest fees, biggest transaction, average size of a block, etc.
• Opensource: pident is released under the Do What The Fuck You Want license. It's basically less legally ambiguous public domain. You can run your own pident instance locally, play with the code, … You're free to do anything you want, for any purpose!
• Blockexplorer-compatible URIs: most of the URIs are compatible with Blockexplorer, so you can compare both tools by only changing the domain name.

Caveats

• This tool is still experimental, it may break at any moment. Although I do most of my breakage on the testing version, it's better for you to be warned. Please don't use pident if you need a reliable service (for example, links in your pool statistics).
• Performance may be poor: I am running this at home with my poor upload bandwidth. Please don't hammer the server with lots of automated requests. If you need to, I'd rather you run your own pident instance locally (and I may even help you do so).

Try it !

• Try the regular (decimal) version: pident.artefact2.com
• Try the tonal version: tonal.pident.artefact2.com
• Browse the source code on GitHub: https://github.com/Artefact2/pident

If you need support, or have comments, you can post on this thread or send me an email (artefact2@gmail.com). Thanks!

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[1bitc0inplz]

Great job on pident!

We've already started linking to you instead of block explorer. The UI alone makes it worth it 

[Sukrim]

Full tonal compatibility: pident can operate in decimal or in tonal mode. You choose which one you preffer.

Hehe, tonal geekiness knows no borders, hm?

How exactly do you identify which blocks belong to which pools, where do I have to look in the code?

[Artefact2]

How exactly do you identify which blocks belong to which pools, where do I have to look in the code?

I try to use their API if they have some, or I just parse their statistics page. Some pools are trickier than others but it's not a big obstacle anyway (MtRed, BTCMP for example)…
The interesting code that does this is here: https://github.com/Artefact2/pident/blob/master/lib/inc.pools.php#L62

[doldgigger]

How exactly do you identify which blocks belong to which pools, where do I have to look in the code?

I try to use their API if they have some, or I just parse their statistics page. Some pools are trickier than others but it's not a big obstacle anyway (MtRed, BTCMP for example)…
The interesting code that does this is here: https://github.com/Artefact2/pident/blob/master/lib/inc.pools.php#L62

Great work! This looks very much like what I was looking for in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28309.0 . Basically, my idea is that miners should be able to easily verify the transaction fee policies of the pools they mine for, so they can have their share of control over how this is handled in the bitcoin network.

Maybe it is possible to promote some kind of standard interface for pools to serve this data (consisting of a pident plugin and some PHP code for pool owners), so we an reduce the number of blocks where the pool remains unidentified.

[Graet]

I picked up the link in irc and have ben using it for a while it also inspired me to add some more stats to my pool
- awesome job Artefact2
Thanks,
Graet

[Artefact2]

Added BitMinter support. If I'm missing other pools, don't hesitate to nag me about it. (Or even better, add the support yourself and make a pull request!)

[Reckman]

Wont pool hoppers use/abuse this sort of thing? 

[Artefact2]

Wont pool hoppers use/abuse this sort of thing? 

Maybe. That's not my problem.

[Graet]

Wont pool hoppers use/abuse this sort of thing? 

in what way? they already use pools APIs to know when to hop.

[miscreanity]

Added BitMinter support. If I'm missing other pools, don't hesitate to nag me about it. (Or even better, add the support yourself and make a pull request!)

If I had the time...

BitClockers?

[Artefact2]

Added BitMinter support. If I'm missing other pools, don't hesitate to nag me about it. (Or even better, add the support yourself and make a pull request!)

If I had the time...

BitClockers?

Yeah, unfortunately it's not as easy as it sounds. They don't put block hashes or block numbers, only a date. I tried to correlate the dates they give with the time headers of blocks, unsuccessfully. I tried every time zone, so I think they deliberately obfuscate their data. Until they do something about it, I can't really do much.

[teukon]

Do you think it would be difficult to add simplecoin.us?  It's not a pool which is trying to hide information and the site is being actively developed but I don't know the API situation.  It's been at 50 Gh/s recently so is big enough to be worth considering.

I offer 1 BTC for the addition of this pool.

The developers can be easily contacted here.

[darnoth]

I tried running this in the past, but whenever I run updateblocks it fails to import, repeatedly spewing out:

PHP Warning:  pg_fetch_row() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /root/pident/lib/inc.update.php on line 34
PHP Warning:  pg_query(): Query failed: ERROR:  current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block in /root/pident/lib/inc.update.php on line 100
000015/141657 processing... (00000000b3322c8c3ef7d2cf6da009a776e6a99ee65ec5a32f3f345712238473)PHP Warning:  pg_query(): Query failed: ERROR:  current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block in /root/pident/lib/inc.update.php on line 33

Can you tell me what version of postgresql you are using?

Thanks.

[Artefact2]

I tried running this in the past, but whenever I run updateblocks it fails to import, repeatedly spewing out:

PHP Warning:  pg_fetch_row() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /root/pident/lib/inc.update.php on line 34
PHP Warning:  pg_query(): Query failed: ERROR:  current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block in /root/pident/lib/inc.update.php on line 100
000015/141657 processing... (00000000b3322c8c3ef7d2cf6da009a776e6a99ee65ec5a32f3f345712238473)PHP Warning:  pg_query(): Query failed: ERROR:  current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block in /root/pident/lib/inc.update.php on line 33

Can you tell me what version of postgresql you are using?

Thanks.

This was solved on IRC, but the problem was using PostgreSQL 8.x (needs version 9 at least).

[Artefact2]

Do you think it would be difficult to add simplecoin.us?  It's not a pool which is trying to hide information and the site is being actively developed but I don't know the API situation.  It's been at 50 Gh/s recently so is big enough to be worth considering.

I offer 1 BTC for the addition of this pool.

The developers can be easily contacted here.

Okay, done. Now I don't mind you donating 1 BTC for pident developement, but to be honest, I don't think a 5-line commit is worth this

[teukon]

Do you think it would be difficult to add simplecoin.us?  It's not a pool which is trying to hide information and the site is being actively developed but I don't know the API situation.  It's been at 50 Gh/s recently so is big enough to be worth considering.

I offer 1 BTC for the addition of this pool.

The developers can be easily contacted here.

Okay, done. Now I don't mind you donating 1 BTC for pident developement, but to be honest, I don't think a 5-line commit is worth this

Damn! I didn't know it would be so easy.

Ah well, I'm a man of my word so 1 BTC for you.  Enjoy!

[Artefact2]

Okay, the recent changes are enough for a version bump (because why not?). There is now a cool SVG graph of pool sizes, pools are now correctly sorted by descending size. Added support for BTCServ and readded RFCPool (yes, they repoened!).

I'd like to add BitClockers, ABCPool and NinjaCoin to the list, but I can't… If you want them too, try to convince the operators to publish their blocks!

(Also, sorry for the downtime Monday & Tuesday, had a big power outage just when I left the house for 2 days…)

[leveer]

Only three confirmed block owners since block #144,352, and none since #144,364. Did something radical change in the last 8 hours?

[mb300sd]

Completely down now???