
BitIodine – Get more from the blockchain - moonlander
https://bitiodine.net
======
ajaimk
Great Idea. Unfortunately, the server seems to be unable to handle the load.

~~~
moonlander
Backend is up again, sorry :) .

------
jdmarble
This is some great work! As part of a school assignment a few years ago, we
just barely scratched the surface of block chain analysis [1]. We stopped at
loading the block chain into Neo4j, scraping public internet forums for
donation accounts, and making simple visualizations. It's cool to see the idea
taken so far.

[1]
[https://plus.google.com/109389788036578433900/posts/hvhwFcp3...](https://plus.google.com/109389788036578433900/posts/hvhwFcp3Hdd)

~~~
moonlander
I wish I had seen this earlier! :) Thank you!

------
Alex3917
Apparently chemistry names are the new hot trend for startups. This is the
third on HN within the last week. It's a pretty good idea though because the
names sound like what they do; naptha makes sense as the name for an image
extractor since naphtha is used for doing quick and dirty extractions while
making drugs, iodine makes sense here because it's used to bring out more
detail in samples when doing microscopy, etc.

~~~
piggity
Except if your target customer isn't a chemist.

~~~
thwarted
It could potentially increase awareness of chemistry, the dangers of
dihydrogen monoxyide not withstanding.

------
sirdogealot
I believe the word that OP was looking for in his title was "block chain". Not
"blockchain".

Blockchain is the company name of one of your competitors.

One of the speakers at the Toronto Bitcoin Expo corrected his own slide during
his own company's presentation concerning this matter. It was quite comical.

~~~
nwh
Unfortunately quite fuzzy due to that ridiculous website. I wish they hadn't
done that.

~~~
sirdogealot
And I wish I was the guy who first thought to buy blockchain.com back on March
8th, 2011.

It was certainly a wise business move.

------
moonlander
Thank you extrapolate and ajaimk! Yes, the backend is suffering a bit - but it
will be back in a few minutes.

This is just a very limited demo of what BitIodine can do! For more info click
on "About" or wait till new features ("Get insights") make it to the web
interface.

------
olalonde
Do you store the block chain in a SQL database as well as neo4j? If so, what
SQL database are you using? I've written a tool that stores the block chain in
PostgreSQL but INSERTs are getting a bit slow due to indexes. Maybe we could
share notes...

~~~
moonlander
I am using SQLite (yeah) for blockchain data and the C++ LEMON library for in-
memory graph operations. Every module is able to update incrementally.

------
grrowl
Very interesting work. I might suggest you remove the `target="_blank"` from
the links — if people want new tabs they can do so quite easily.

~~~
moonlander
You're right, done except for the footer! Thanks for your input!

------
extrapolate
Neat tool. I think it could definitely be enhanced with some visuals though,
maybe on the cluster page you could graph related addresses or something.

------
harrigan
Very cool. Are you able to compute the shortest paths on fly?

~~~
moonlander
Yes, computation is done in memory and is reasonably fast, with some clever
caching. Right now the backend server is overloaded - I am working on it and
you will be able to try it with custom addresses very soon.

------
nwh
The terms on your website don't really mesh with the actual behavior of the
blockchain. There is no "from" address, there is never a "from" address.

~~~
olalonde
In this context, I believe the "from" address would be TxOuts which use a pay-
to-pubkeyhash script.

~~~
nwh
That's not "from" an address though.

~~~
olalonde
Why not? TxOuts are spent when creating new transactions, hence the "from".

~~~
nwh
"From" implies to users that _every_ previous output is owned by a person, is
controlled by a person, or is even an address. None of these are always true
(though they usually are), which leads to disasters like people sending
"refunds" to shared addresses. It's not a concept in the reference client and
should be avoided to prevent more confusion than blockchain.info has already
caused.

If I spend a script with no hash160/p2sh address, where is it "from"?

~~~
olalonde
Ah, I see your point now. I agree it can be confusing to a non technical
audience but presumably, this tool is for people who have prior knowledge on
how the block chain works.

~~~
nwh
It's probably best to avoid using the term anyway. Blockchain.info should
really only be a technical tool but non-technical people seem to insist on
using it and misunderstanding it.

