Bitcoin Graph Explorer 3.1 is here

As you probably know, our site is based on — and actually a kind of demo site for — our own blockchain analysis server Bitcoin Graph Explorer (BGE). The source code for this has always been available, but to be honest it would have been hard for anyone but us (well, including us) to actually use it.

So we have spent a few weeks thinking about how we could make the code more accessible, adding such niceties as a license, Readme, wrapper scripts, nix packages … in short, we are proud to be finally able to really tell you that Bitcoin Graph Explorer is open source software that we invite you to try out, use and improve with us.

This also means you have less excuses for trusting our website with your data when you don’t want to. Just run your own copy of BGE! Admittedly, it still requires some commitment: Storing and analysing the blockchain takes a lot of memory and time. Blockchains come with a cost, you know. We recommend at least a 512GB SSD (the DB takes about 300G at the moment and grows quickly at about triple the rate of the pure bitcoind blockchain). Populating the DB takes about a day on our server. On a hard disk, that is probably more like a week. You should, however, be able to work with relatively little RAM since we have rebuilt BGE to replace RAM with LMDB where possible.

To summarize, there are now at least three options of using BGE: Directly on bitcoinprivacy.net, the public API (blog post forthcoming, overview in the github readme) at http://api.bitcoinprivacy.net, and on your own server (preferably via the API though you could also work with the DB directly). We hope you find this useful for your bitcoin projects.

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