Bitcoin blockchain explorer explained

Note that these pages do not send a trailing newline, which may cause problems with your HTTP-fetching tool. An empty result is also an error.

Non-fatal errors will print query results on the next line after the error, though using this data is inadvisable. To get block or transaction info, first find the hash of the item. For example, to get the hash of block number If the search returns any status code other than , then the search is bad. A status code of indicates that the search was ambiguous, and the page body will contain links to the choices. Example of search ambiguity. A search with no search terms will redirect to the home page.

Searches for valid block numbers will always redirect to the block with that number ignoring all other search types , though you can force BBE to assume a hex value by preceding it with "0x". The shortlinks at the top of most pages are similar to searches. It is possible for shortlinks to be ambiguous, and they will likewise return a status code in that case.

A full XML interface is planned. Scraping the HTML pages is not recommended, as the layout can change at any time. Retrieved from " https: Services Block chain browsers. Navigation menu Personal tools Create account Log in.

Views Read View source View history. Sister projects Essays Source. It was originally written by theymos, but it is now operated by Liraz Siri. Each object is displayed in human-readable form, as a web page, and is given a URL.

By using hyperlinks, it allows users to switch from seeing one piece of data to a related one, with a single click. Clicking on the hash of an object, will move to the page that displays its data.

This way for instance, you can switch from looking at a transaction, to looking at the previous transaction which gave this transaction its inputs.

All block data is visible, in human-readable or machine-readable forms, and even some information that is not actually part of blocks. It is mainly aimed at advanced users who already know what blocks are and what kind of information they contain, but a lot of helpful information is provided in tool-tips. A listing of "strange transactions" is displayed in the main page, along with listings of the latest and largest transactions. Bitcoin Block Explorer can also display information from the Testnet.

Many of the real-time stats pages existed before Bitcoin Block Explorer at http: These pages were made in response to block and difficulty values being "hard-coded" into text on the old wiki, which quickly made the information obsolete.

Bitcoin Block Explorer was first made available around November at http: It was initially meant to be the Bitcoin equivalent of TorStatus , dumping all important data about the network. After it became much more popular than the real-time stats pages, BBE was moved to http: Use the query pages such as getreceivedbyaddress wherever possible.

Note that these pages do not send a trailing newline, which may cause problems with your HTTP-fetching tool. An empty result is also an error. Non-fatal errors will print query results on the next line after the error, though using this data is inadvisable. To get block or transaction info, first find the hash of the item.