So I originally came here to post this idea:
- A service that runs all coin daemons (Bitcoin and alts) and keeps them up to date
- If you wanted access you'd pay a few sheckles and you'd get a shell account with a read-only copy of ~/.bitcoin (symlinked or similar so it's always up to date)
- If you wanted write access you'd pay a bit more and get a writable copy (maybe everything but wallet.dat is still read-only?). In this case a private daemon would be running just for you so you'd pay extra.
- You'd get a username/password that would allow you to connect to the daemon and use the API to read or write as needed
The reason for the service is of course that it's such a pain to keep all of these wallets and blockchains up to date on your own computer. They can take forever to sync and use lots of disk space and for some reason are even CPU intensive when they're downloading the blockchain.
Today I came across a few services that are doing something similar:
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http://blockchain.info/: Well of course we all know this one. Bitcoin only, access is via custom API.
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https://apicoin.io/: "Put the Bitcoin node in the Cloud!" Bitcoin only, access is via custom API.
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http://www.blockcypher.com/: "Powering block chains in the cloud". Bitcoin and Litecoin, homepage suggests they may add new coins, access is via custom unified API.
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https://helloblock.io/: "Focus on building Bitcoin apps, not infrastructure." Bitcoin only, access is via custom API.
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https://chain.com/: "The Block Chain API for Developers" Bitcoin only, access is via custom API.
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http://blockr.io/: BTC, LTC, TBTC, DGC, QRK, PPC, MEC, access is via custom unified API.
I'm not including normal block explorers on the list because they don't have a unified API and are usually very slow and unreliable.
Of the existing services blockr.io comes the closest but they haven't added a new coin in forever and the alt ones they have aren't really useful.
In order to keep up with all the new coins that come out, such a service could even allow the coin devs themselves to maintain their coin's daemon. If the service was popular enough every dev would want to their coin to be included. They could be given access to a chrooted account or similar to set up the daemon and then the unified API just routes calls to it. And best of all if a coin daemon breaks or gets on the wrong fork or whatever the dev will be the one getting yelled at and not the service operator.
If you wanted to get really advanced you could even make an API/protocol that allows the wallet.dat to be stored locally while making calls to the hosted daemon. Like Electrum and Multibit, but with more direct access to the daemon and a unified API for all coins.
So, any thoughts on such a service? Any other existing services that offer something similar?
Edit: Also another related idea: you could create a snapshot of all the daemons and create VPSs on demand for customers that they could connect to via VNC. That way with a few clicks the customer would have a desktop open that has all of the wallets, available and up-to-date as of the time the snapshot was created. They could do whatever they need to and kill the VPS afterward.
Edit 2: There's also a GitHub repo that is trying to unify block explorer APIs. It doesn't solve the problem of block explorers being slow and unreliable though:
https://github.com/RCasatta/blockchain-common-api
