

Show HN: Post Bitcoin transactions in one page of JS code  - CatheryneN
http://dev.blockcypher.com/samples/create-tx.html

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mriou
The full API documentation can be found there:

[http://dev.blockcypher.com/](http://dev.blockcypher.com/)

Includes websockets and webhooks to get notified on a variety of blockchain
events.

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wmf
Using a remote server to build the transaction and then signing it locally
seems pretty cumbersome.

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mriou
It's much simpler than it sounds, only 7 lines of code in the sample posted.
The point is that most people don't want to share their private key or their
users' private keys, justifiably so.

The alternative is building the full binary transaction on your end, which
involves selecting inputs, generating scripts, worrying about fees, etc.
Implementing that is a week's project. Using an API is 5 min.

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wmf
_The alternative is building the full binary transaction on your end, which
involves selecting inputs, generating scripts, worrying about fees, etc.
Implementing that is a week 's project._

Hasn't BitCore already done that?

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mriou
They have. But only if you're on node.js and you need to run bitcoind
yourself. Which means maintaining it, backups, restart scripts, etc. Building
the transaction using BitCore isn't really simpler either (see the sample
[https://github.com/bitpay/bitcore/blob/master/examples/Creat...](https://github.com/bitpay/bitcore/blob/master/examples/CreateAndSignTx-
PayToPubkeyHash.js)).

So using BlockCypher's API to do that is much more portable (you have ECDSA
signature libs in most PLs) and avoids all the hassles of additional
infrastructure.

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alexism
so you guys are giving free coins? cool! ;) nice api!

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CatheryneN
Thanks! Yes, for test =). At the BoostVC Hackathon yesterday, the team that
won, CoinViz, used one of our APIs to do a visual representation of the
blockchain: 110k requests in 5hrs and our infrastructure was still bored.

