This is a basic blockchain explorer for exploring Bitcoin data.

The main features of this explorer are:

• Basic. The data is laid out to try and represent the structure of raw transactions and blocks.
• Fast. I've made the pages load as fast as I can. If you can't be pretty, you might as well be fast.

So it's pretty basic, but I think you can learn a lot about how Bitcoin works by browsing the raw data and seeing how it all connects together.

Data

The data on this explorer comes from the following sources:

1. Bitcoin Core. This is used to get raw transaction and block data. This is retrieved via simple bitcoin-cli commands.
2. Electrum Server. This is used to get information about address balances. Bitcoin Core doesn't keep track of addresses, so you need a separate database running alongside it to store address balances and activity. This information is retrieved using the Electrum protocol.

   Electrum Server is what wallets like Electrum and Sparrow Wallet use.

3. SSDB. I'm using a simple key-value database with a custom script to store the spent location of each output. This allows you to move forward from the output of one transaction to the input of the next transaction (if the output has been spent).

Limitations

• Address history limit. This explorer will only show the most recent 500 outputs locked to an address.

  This is due to the fact that the data for each output needs to be retrieved from Bitcoin Core individually, so showing all of the outputs at some addresses would be extremely slow (as some addresses have thousands of outputs).

  However, the address balances are correct. It's just there's a limitation on the number of outputs displayed at each address.

  The explorer will also not show the outputs for extremely busy addresses (ones involved in over 125,000 transactions).

If you're looking for an advanced explorer that offers more features, try mempool.space instead. But if you hate beautiful websites and only want to dig around raw data quickly, this explorer should do the job.

Privacy

This blockchain explorer does not track anything.

I do not collect IP addresses or keep track of requests. Nor do I use any third-party analytics or tracking software.

However, this blockchain explorer is not open-source, so you have to trust me on this one.

Bitcoin Core Explorer

If you want to explore blockchain data without having to trust anyone with your privacy, the simplest way to do this is to run your own Bitcoin Core node and run bitcoin-cli commands.

The two most useful commands are:

• bitcoin-cli getrawtransaction <txid>
• bitcoin-cli getblock <hash>

Alternatively, you can also run your own self-hosted explorer such as mempool or btc-rpc-explorer.