7 ms·

Chain, the Blockchain API for developers

97 points by jmduke 12y ago

alco 12y ago
Why is it not open source? I smell lock in.
- saurik 12y ago
  Would it really be that hard to reimplement this yourself if you needed to? The idea seems to be that this is a service: it isn't doing anything that difficult to accomplish, it is just doing something that happens to be resource intensive.
  - nwh 12y ago
    CPU resources or human ones? This package by Bitpay solves the latter. https://github.com/bitpay/insight https://github.com/bitpay/insight
    - saurik 12y ago
      That's the wrong repository: that's a front-end (a UI written using angular); the backend repository (which could be said to be an open-source implementation of chain.com) is the one I link below. All this package does is provide a node.js wrapper for the bitcoind API. Almost all of the code (in both repositories) is project boilerplate or data marshaling: everything even remotely difficult is just "run bitcoind". I maintain it would be difficult to get locked in to a service like this just because it isn't open source: it isn't that difficult to rewrite. https://github.com/bitpay/insight-api https://github.com/bitpay/insight-api As for "resource intensive", I was thinking memory, disk space, and network connectivity: the reason these services are valuable is because the blockchain is 18GB at this point, so downloading it to clients or even storing it at all on some clients, is at minimum "egregiously painful" and sometimes "pretty much impossible". If you want to be able to answer tons of different kinds of questions about transactions with low latency you are likely going to be storing this information with a number of specialized indexes, further increasing the database size requirement. However, "people" is also a valuable point, but no: having an open source project doesn't solve that; if you make a program that uses bitcoin, you either have to download and manipulate the blockchain locally (which sounds awesome, and is arguably half the point of bitcoin to many reasonable people, but in practice is not realistic or even possible in many if not most interesting situations) or use a service. You can either run your own service or use someone else's. I enjoy running services: I accept that most people do not ;P. Instead, they would rather use a hosted API such as this one (or any of the numerous existing alternatives to this one) so they don't have to have people maintaining servers.
      - nwh 12y ago
        The reality though is that most people will never, ever need this sort of information. Unless you have a particular desire to run a block explorer or other lookup service, you are only going to be interested in addresses that you own and not those of the rest of the network. You don't need to store extended lookup tables and indexes for an ever increasing amount of information, doing so is foolish as it doesn't scale at all with the size of the network. If a service needs to have a wallet connected to the network without the resources for storing the entire blockchain, they can just use a SPV [0] client like BitcoinJ to set bloom filters on their peers. They then get a stream of trustless information that's only relevant to the wallet at hand. You end up with a local service that's faster, completely under your control, and has a tiny resource footprint. You could happily run that a device like an iPhone, no problem. [0]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Simplified_payment_verification https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Simplified_payment_ve...
        saurik 12y ago
        So, this is the first I'd heard of the bloom filter feature: the descriptions I've seen of SPV allowed the client to only store a subset of the data, but still needed to download everything at least once in order to have any semblance of trust in the data it was seeing. The web page you link you also has a "See Also" to a page that makes bitcoinj sound horribly insecure, but maybe that's no longer the case with the bloom filter extension? This was all written before this bloom filter feature existed (which was late October of 2012); despite that being a little over a year and a half ago, there is almost no mention anywhere of it... I will have to spend more time learning about this feature and see how it changes things. (Maybe you are then correct: having a service like this is totally useless. However, I would then argue that it should be a really big priority to make people understand that this feature exists, is deployed, is practical, and is secure, as otherwise people are going to keep going about their lives as I have assuming this is all impossible with the current implementation of Bitcoin.)
        nwh 12y ago
        Ugh, yeah the documentation for anything related to Bitcoin is terrible. Originally it didn't use bloom filters, they're a new thing as of Bitcoin client version 0.8 and above. > the descriptions I've seen of SPV allowed the client to only store a subset of the data, but still needed to download everything at least once in order to have any semblance of trust in the data it was seeing. With bloom filters you don't need to bother with all of that. The headers of the blocks are separate from the transaction data itself (that's in the merkle tree), so the SPV client can download all of the headers up to the current date and verify their difficulty in a few seconds. As the wallet gains addresses it sets bloom filters with it's peers, when they announce a new block on the network they send the SPV client the block header and also a trimmed merkle tree with only the transactions relevant to the client left in it. The SPV client can verify that the transaction is in the block by following up the tree to the block header, without ever needing to download the entire thing. Privacy is gained by setting false positives in the filter, the more junk results the less likely it in the peer can discover what the SPV client is really interested in and what is being discarded. The SPV client ultimately doesn't need to store anything but the outputs that are unspent, and transaction history if this is required. There's no trust in the peers as at worst they can withhold blocks from us that contain transactional data, to counter this we can connect to multiple peers with the same filters set and compare the difference. > However, I would then argue that it should be a really big priority to make people understand that this feature exists, is deployed, is practical, and is secure, as otherwise people are going to keep going about their lives as I have assuming this is all impossible with the current implementation of Bitcoin This is a problem really, we have lots of awesome crypto features but everybody just insists on using solutions that don't scale like blockchain.info. The original whitepaper describes some of the scaling features but doesn't mention bloom filters specifically I don't think.
- axefrog 12y ago
  Rubbish. Write a thin abstraction layer between your app and the Chain API and should you wish to switch in the future, change the implementation of the abstraction layer to point at your bitcoind server or something else.
- k0mplex 12y ago
  It will be open source soon =)
imkevinxu 12y ago
I'm more interested in how they got chain.com
- saurik 12y ago
  Playing around on archive.org, this domain name seems to have never been used for anything, so it was probably just a matter of obtaining enough money to purchase it.
Rygu 12y ago
Having worked with the Blockchain.info API, I am quite disappointed that Chain.com (great domain name!) haven't put much effort into building a better, more developer-friendly API. I mean returning variables named "n" and some awkwardly abbreviated to "reqSigs" ? C'mon we need better than this. You can do better than this! For inspiriation: - https://www.parse.com/docs/rest https://www.parse.com/docs/rest - https://stripe.com/docs/api https://stripe.com/docs/api
- k0mplex 12y ago
  We are just getting started (day 2!), so stay tuned, and hopefully we will turn you into a fan! And thank you for sharing those links, we love those as role models as well.
  - saurik 12y ago
    These are the kinds of details you have to get right at day 0 as you can't just randomly change the API later.
    - peterwiese 12y ago
      hey saurik! OT: are you still involved with cydia?
  - nwh 12y ago
    It shows. Why do some API calls result in a negative balance? You can't have a negative balance. $ curl https://GUEST-TOKEN@api.chain.com/bitcoin/addresses/1dice8EMZmqKvrGE4Qc9bUFf9PX3xaYDp {"hash":"1dice8EMZmqKvrGE4Qc9bUFf9PX3xaYDp","balance":-7706880,"received":101730741984389,"sent":101730749691269,"unconfirmed_received":6750000,"unconfirmed_sent":0,"unconfirmed_balance":6750000}
nullc 12y ago
Bitcoin was created to reduce the level of trust required for the operation of monetary systems. Everytime I see another centralized interface to Bitcoin it depresses me. Centralized interfaces on top of Bitcoin are sort of a worst of all worlds, gaining all of the disadvantages of both centralized and decentralized approaches.
- wyager 12y ago
  Exactly. Why can't people release packages for examining local copies of the blockchain? The blockchain isn't exactly hard to acquire.
  - _pius 12y ago
    Why can't people release packages for examining local copies of the blockchain? "People." Why don't you write one instead of just criticizing theirs from the sideline?
    - simoncarter 12y ago
      Maybe because he is to busy. Or maybe because of a 100 different other reasons. Whatever his excuse, the fact that someone could be to busy to implement some software doesn't mean they can't critique something they don't like, or suggest ideas for things they do.
    - qq66 12y ago
      It takes a lot more skill and capability to be a creator than a consumer. I would like someone to make a movie about two time travelers who chase each other through time like a car chase. However I have zero filmmaking skill and I don't really know how to even start such a thing. My skills are best applied elsewhere, that doesn't mean I can't cross my fingers and hope that a talented filmmaker makes that movie.
  - vbuterin 12y ago
    Because nobody wants to store and maintain a local copy of the blockchain. Simple as that. That's why I use blockchain.info for everything and not bitcoind.
nwh 12y ago
Anybody working with Bitcoin should really avoid services like this just for their own sanity. You've a wealth of freely accessible data in the form of the 20GB blockchain, why rely on trusting a third party for their uptime, privacy and security? It sort of already shows in the Bitcoin ecosystem, every time Blockchain.info (the biggest API provider) glitches up, all of the services relying on it die as well. Last time it went down there were people complaining that their ATMS could no longer work without Blockchain.info functioning.
- saurik 12y ago
  Last year it was a 10GB large blockchain. Next year it will be a 40GB large blockchain. I think the argument is that no normal user considers it reasonable that you have to download tens of gigabytes of data to every single client, with at least another gigabyte every month to "keep up", in order to get relatively basic functionality. Many devices don't even have 20GB of storage in the first place :/.
- runeks 12y ago
  > You've a wealth of freely accessible data in the form of the 20GB blockchain, why rely on trusting a third party for their uptime, privacy and security? Except an address index, which is the added value that most of these types of services provide (balance of an address, transactions associated with a particular address, etc.).
  - nwh 12y ago
    Nobody except for people running block explorers really needs this information. If you think you need it then you're probably using Bitcoin completely wrong. Address based indexes don't scale, which is why it doesn't create or even need one.
diego 12y ago
If you're serious about building a Bitcoin service, you don't need an extra layer between you and bitcoind (or bitcoinj). If you find it too hard to deal with the blockchain on your own via those apis, you probably should think twice about developing a Bitcoin service.
- gfodor 12y ago
  Why? Or is this a "no true Scotsman?"
  - diego 12y ago
    Because you're paying a huge price for a small amount of convenience: you are trusting a third party so you don't have to deal with a lightweight server and a few gigabytes of data. It's not like they are providing access to the Twitter firehose or the Google Search Index, which you couldn't have otherwise. Edit: people are really downvote-happy on HN lately. You should not put a reasonable comment in the negative just because you disagree.
    - msie 12y ago
      Well for me I can try some ideas without going all-in to setting up a bitcoind server. blockchain.info seems to have a half-hearted attempt at an API too.
    - runeks 12y ago
      > Because you're paying a huge price for a small amount of convenience: you are trusting a third party so you don't have to deal with a lightweight server and a few gigabytes of data. Can you point me to a ready-to-use address indexer for the blockchain, that can run on a lightweight server and only consumes a few gigabytes of data?
- GigabyteCoin 12y ago
  I wholeheartedly disagree. Chain.com is something I have been hoping to see for quite some time now, personally. I run a "Bitcoin service", it calculates the future difficulty level[0], it's just not all that important to require the constant running of a full bitcoind node. After I completed the Bitcoin version using the blockchain.info API, I realized there was literally no stable API for Namecoin and was forced to place the namecoin difficulty estimator on hold. The minute that Chain.com implements their namecoin API, I will be subscribing. Not because I don't have the competance to build and run a crypto coin daemon 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I simply know that it's a waste of resources for my current needs. [0] https://cryptanalys.is/difficulty/bitcoin_btc.php https://cryptanalys.is/difficulty/bitcoin_btc.php
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GigabyteCoin 12y ago
How much do you plan on charging for the API once it exits beta?
- userbinator 12y ago
  I'd like to remark that payment should naturally be accepted in Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency too.
- k0mplex 12y ago
  We're still working that out. What do you think is fair?
  - GigabyteCoin 12y ago
    I am wanting to use it for my site's difficulty predictor. I would be making about 3 API calls per chain every 10 minutes to suffice for my needs. That's about 12,960 api requests in a 30 day month. I wouldn't be willing to spend any more than $5 on those 12,960 requests... because if that's what it cost, I could just setup a digital ocean vps and run the namecoin blockchain for $5/mo. So somewhere in the order of $5/13,000 requests or about $0.40 per 1,000 requests sounds fair to me.
StavrosK 12y ago
I was just looking at the Blockchain.info transaction API yesterday, and I'm in love with its simplicity. It doesn't even require an account, and it's one endpoint. You just call it with a destination address and a URL, and it returns a source address. Whenever any funds reach the source address, it forwards them to the destination and calls your webhook once for every confirmation it sees. So simple, and so brilliant. I'm trying to brainstorm things to build with it, but so far I've come up short.
maccman 12y ago
I'm am extremely excited about Chain.com, and the other tools being build up around the Bitcoin ecosystem. The power of giving developers simple tools and building blocks is often underestimated - but it often results in radical innovations. A case in point is Stripe's API, and the ecosystem that has been subsequently built around it. Yes, it's possible to send CC auths/settlements and ACH transactions yourself - but the barrier to entry stifles innovation. Often the most interesting innovations in tech occur when there's an innovation in tooling. I'm particularly interesting in Chain.com though, because I think currency is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Blockchains. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a number of other use-cases for Blockchains soon. [1] [1] - https://www.igvita.com/2014/05/05/minimum-viable-block-chain/ https://www.igvita.com/2014/05/05/minimum-viable-block-chain...
Adlai 12y ago
Why has nobody mentioned Obelisk? https://github.com/libbitcoin/obelisk https://github.com/libbitcoin/obelisk
yowmamasita 12y ago
What we need is a bitcoin sdk, not another 3rd-party rest api that will go down if business does not profit. Open source this!
- k0mplex 12y ago
  It will be open source, and will have SDKs, soon.
  - sv123 12y ago
    Twice on Sundays.
kolev 12y ago
Decentralized systems always centralize in time.
lisperforlife 12y ago
I also found http://blockcypher.com http://blockcypher.com to be quite nice. In addition to the blockchain API, they also have APIs for creating transactions and even provide web sockets and web hooks. They do not host the wallet so you do not have to share your private key with them. They will create a transaction for you and you can then sign it with your private key. This is a good gateway for developers into the bitcoin system. The alternative is running bitcoind to download the 17 gig blockchain and then start coding. This provides instant gratification for developers to get started.
damethos 12y ago
To be honest I do not understand why this made it to the HN top posts when there are already other more complete APIs out there such as the Biteasy.com API. Good domain name though. Maybe that's why it made it up here?
wesley 12y ago
Would love if you guys added Nxt to this, it's completely different from bitcoind (it's based on java and a completely new codebase). If we had an API that would work across completely different systems, it would add great value. http://nxt.org http://nxt.org

97 points by jmduke 12y ago

alco 12y ago

Why is it not open source? I smell lock in.

saurik 12y ago
Would it really be that hard to reimplement this yourself if you needed to? The idea seems to be that this is a service: it isn't doing anything that difficult to accomplish, it is just doing something that happens to be resource intensive.
- nwh 12y ago
  CPU resources or human ones? This package by Bitpay solves the latter. https://github.com/bitpay/insight https://github.com/bitpay/insight
  - saurik 12y ago
    That's the wrong repository: that's a front-end (a UI written using angular); the backend repository (which could be said to be an open-source implementation of chain.com) is the one I link below. All this package does is provide a node.js wrapper for the bitcoind API. Almost all of the code (in both repositories) is project boilerplate or data marshaling: everything even remotely difficult is just "run bitcoind". I maintain it would be difficult to get locked in to a service like this just because it isn't open source: it isn't that difficult to rewrite. https://github.com/bitpay/insight-api https://github.com/bitpay/insight-api As for "resource intensive", I was thinking memory, disk space, and network connectivity: the reason these services are valuable is because the blockchain is 18GB at this point, so downloading it to clients or even storing it at all on some clients, is at minimum "egregiously painful" and sometimes "pretty much impossible". If you want to be able to answer tons of different kinds of questions about transactions with low latency you are likely going to be storing this information with a number of specialized indexes, further increasing the database size requirement. However, "people" is also a valuable point, but no: having an open source project doesn't solve that; if you make a program that uses bitcoin, you either have to download and manipulate the blockchain locally (which sounds awesome, and is arguably half the point of bitcoin to many reasonable people, but in practice is not realistic or even possible in many if not most interesting situations) or use a service. You can either run your own service or use someone else's. I enjoy running services: I accept that most people do not ;P. Instead, they would rather use a hosted API such as this one (or any of the numerous existing alternatives to this one) so they don't have to have people maintaining servers.
    - nwh 12y ago
      The reality though is that most people will never, ever need this sort of information. Unless you have a particular desire to run a block explorer or other lookup service, you are only going to be interested in addresses that you own and not those of the rest of the network. You don't need to store extended lookup tables and indexes for an ever increasing amount of information, doing so is foolish as it doesn't scale at all with the size of the network. If a service needs to have a wallet connected to the network without the resources for storing the entire blockchain, they can just use a SPV [0] client like BitcoinJ to set bloom filters on their peers. They then get a stream of trustless information that's only relevant to the wallet at hand. You end up with a local service that's faster, completely under your control, and has a tiny resource footprint. You could happily run that a device like an iPhone, no problem. [0]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Simplified_payment_verification https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Simplified_payment_ve...
      - saurik 12y ago
        So, this is the first I'd heard of the bloom filter feature: the descriptions I've seen of SPV allowed the client to only store a subset of the data, but still needed to download everything at least once in order to have any semblance of trust in the data it was seeing. The web page you link you also has a "See Also" to a page that makes bitcoinj sound horribly insecure, but maybe that's no longer the case with the bloom filter extension? This was all written before this bloom filter feature existed (which was late October of 2012); despite that being a little over a year and a half ago, there is almost no mention anywhere of it... I will have to spend more time learning about this feature and see how it changes things. (Maybe you are then correct: having a service like this is totally useless. However, I would then argue that it should be a really big priority to make people understand that this feature exists, is deployed, is practical, and is secure, as otherwise people are going to keep going about their lives as I have assuming this is all impossible with the current implementation of Bitcoin.)
        nwh 12y ago
        Ugh, yeah the documentation for anything related to Bitcoin is terrible. Originally it didn't use bloom filters, they're a new thing as of Bitcoin client version 0.8 and above. > the descriptions I've seen of SPV allowed the client to only store a subset of the data, but still needed to download everything at least once in order to have any semblance of trust in the data it was seeing. With bloom filters you don't need to bother with all of that. The headers of the blocks are separate from the transaction data itself (that's in the merkle tree), so the SPV client can download all of the headers up to the current date and verify their difficulty in a few seconds. As the wallet gains addresses it sets bloom filters with it's peers, when they announce a new block on the network they send the SPV client the block header and also a trimmed merkle tree with only the transactions relevant to the client left in it. The SPV client can verify that the transaction is in the block by following up the tree to the block header, without ever needing to download the entire thing. Privacy is gained by setting false positives in the filter, the more junk results the less likely it in the peer can discover what the SPV client is really interested in and what is being discarded. The SPV client ultimately doesn't need to store anything but the outputs that are unspent, and transaction history if this is required. There's no trust in the peers as at worst they can withhold blocks from us that contain transactional data, to counter this we can connect to multiple peers with the same filters set and compare the difference. > However, I would then argue that it should be a really big priority to make people understand that this feature exists, is deployed, is practical, and is secure, as otherwise people are going to keep going about their lives as I have assuming this is all impossible with the current implementation of Bitcoin This is a problem really, we have lots of awesome crypto features but everybody just insists on using solutions that don't scale like blockchain.info. The original whitepaper describes some of the scaling features but doesn't mention bloom filters specifically I don't think.
axefrog 12y ago
Rubbish. Write a thin abstraction layer between your app and the Chain API and should you wish to switch in the future, change the implementation of the abstraction layer to point at your bitcoind server or something else.
k0mplex 12y ago
It will be open source soon =)

imkevinxu 12y ago

I'm more interested in how they got chain.com

saurik 12y ago
Playing around on archive.org, this domain name seems to have never been used for anything, so it was probably just a matter of obtaining enough money to purchase it.

Rygu 12y ago

Having worked with the Blockchain.info API, I am quite disappointed that Chain.com (great domain name!) haven't put much effort into building a better, more developer-friendly API. I mean returning variables named "n" and some awkwardly abbreviated to "reqSigs" ? C'mon we need better than this. You can do better than this! For inspiriation: - https://www.parse.com/docs/rest https://www.parse.com/docs/rest - https://stripe.com/docs/api https://stripe.com/docs/api

k0mplex 12y ago
We are just getting started (day 2!), so stay tuned, and hopefully we will turn you into a fan! And thank you for sharing those links, we love those as role models as well.
- saurik 12y ago
  These are the kinds of details you have to get right at day 0 as you can't just randomly change the API later.
  - peterwiese 12y ago
    hey saurik! OT: are you still involved with cydia?
- nwh 12y ago
  It shows. Why do some API calls result in a negative balance? You can't have a negative balance. $ curl https://GUEST-TOKEN@api.chain.com/bitcoin/addresses/1dice8EMZmqKvrGE4Qc9bUFf9PX3xaYDp {"hash":"1dice8EMZmqKvrGE4Qc9bUFf9PX3xaYDp","balance":-7706880,"received":101730741984389,"sent":101730749691269,"unconfirmed_received":6750000,"unconfirmed_sent":0,"unconfirmed_balance":6750000}

nullc 12y ago

Bitcoin was created to reduce the level of trust required for the operation of monetary systems. Everytime I see another centralized interface to Bitcoin it depresses me. Centralized interfaces on top of Bitcoin are sort of a worst of all worlds, gaining all of the disadvantages of both centralized and decentralized approaches.

wyager 12y ago
Exactly. Why can't people release packages for examining local copies of the blockchain? The blockchain isn't exactly hard to acquire.
- _pius 12y ago
  Why can't people release packages for examining local copies of the blockchain? "People." Why don't you write one instead of just criticizing theirs from the sideline?
  - simoncarter 12y ago
    Maybe because he is to busy. Or maybe because of a 100 different other reasons. Whatever his excuse, the fact that someone could be to busy to implement some software doesn't mean they can't critique something they don't like, or suggest ideas for things they do.
  - qq66 12y ago
    It takes a lot more skill and capability to be a creator than a consumer. I would like someone to make a movie about two time travelers who chase each other through time like a car chase. However I have zero filmmaking skill and I don't really know how to even start such a thing. My skills are best applied elsewhere, that doesn't mean I can't cross my fingers and hope that a talented filmmaker makes that movie.
- vbuterin 12y ago
  Because nobody wants to store and maintain a local copy of the blockchain. Simple as that. That's why I use blockchain.info for everything and not bitcoind.

nwh 12y ago

Anybody working with Bitcoin should really avoid services like this just for their own sanity. You've a wealth of freely accessible data in the form of the 20GB blockchain, why rely on trusting a third party for their uptime, privacy and security? It sort of already shows in the Bitcoin ecosystem, every time Blockchain.info (the biggest API provider) glitches up, all of the services relying on it die as well. Last time it went down there were people complaining that their ATMS could no longer work without Blockchain.info functioning.

saurik 12y ago
Last year it was a 10GB large blockchain. Next year it will be a 40GB large blockchain. I think the argument is that no normal user considers it reasonable that you have to download tens of gigabytes of data to every single client, with at least another gigabyte every month to "keep up", in order to get relatively basic functionality. Many devices don't even have 20GB of storage in the first place :/.
runeks 12y ago
> You've a wealth of freely accessible data in the form of the 20GB blockchain, why rely on trusting a third party for their uptime, privacy and security? Except an address index, which is the added value that most of these types of services provide (balance of an address, transactions associated with a particular address, etc.).
- nwh 12y ago
  Nobody except for people running block explorers really needs this information. If you think you need it then you're probably using Bitcoin completely wrong. Address based indexes don't scale, which is why it doesn't create or even need one.

diego 12y ago

If you're serious about building a Bitcoin service, you don't need an extra layer between you and bitcoind (or bitcoinj). If you find it too hard to deal with the blockchain on your own via those apis, you probably should think twice about developing a Bitcoin service.

gfodor 12y ago
Why? Or is this a "no true Scotsman?"
- diego 12y ago
  Because you're paying a huge price for a small amount of convenience: you are trusting a third party so you don't have to deal with a lightweight server and a few gigabytes of data. It's not like they are providing access to the Twitter firehose or the Google Search Index, which you couldn't have otherwise. Edit: people are really downvote-happy on HN lately. You should not put a reasonable comment in the negative just because you disagree.
  - msie 12y ago
    Well for me I can try some ideas without going all-in to setting up a bitcoind server. blockchain.info seems to have a half-hearted attempt at an API too.
  - runeks 12y ago
    > Because you're paying a huge price for a small amount of convenience: you are trusting a third party so you don't have to deal with a lightweight server and a few gigabytes of data. Can you point me to a ready-to-use address indexer for the blockchain, that can run on a lightweight server and only consumes a few gigabytes of data?
GigabyteCoin 12y ago
I wholeheartedly disagree. Chain.com is something I have been hoping to see for quite some time now, personally. I run a "Bitcoin service", it calculates the future difficulty level[0], it's just not all that important to require the constant running of a full bitcoind node. After I completed the Bitcoin version using the blockchain.info API, I realized there was literally no stable API for Namecoin and was forced to place the namecoin difficulty estimator on hold. The minute that Chain.com implements their namecoin API, I will be subscribing. Not because I don't have the competance to build and run a crypto coin daemon 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I simply know that it's a waste of resources for my current needs. [0] https://cryptanalys.is/difficulty/bitcoin_btc.php https://cryptanalys.is/difficulty/bitcoin_btc.php

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GigabyteCoin 12y ago

How much do you plan on charging for the API once it exits beta?

userbinator 12y ago
I'd like to remark that payment should naturally be accepted in Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency too.
k0mplex 12y ago
We're still working that out. What do you think is fair?
- GigabyteCoin 12y ago
  I am wanting to use it for my site's difficulty predictor. I would be making about 3 API calls per chain every 10 minutes to suffice for my needs. That's about 12,960 api requests in a 30 day month. I wouldn't be willing to spend any more than $5 on those 12,960 requests... because if that's what it cost, I could just setup a digital ocean vps and run the namecoin blockchain for $5/mo. So somewhere in the order of $5/13,000 requests or about $0.40 per 1,000 requests sounds fair to me.

StavrosK 12y ago

I was just looking at the Blockchain.info transaction API yesterday, and I'm in love with its simplicity. It doesn't even require an account, and it's one endpoint. You just call it with a destination address and a URL, and it returns a source address. Whenever any funds reach the source address, it forwards them to the destination and calls your webhook once for every confirmation it sees. So simple, and so brilliant. I'm trying to brainstorm things to build with it, but so far I've come up short.

maccman 12y ago

I'm am extremely excited about Chain.com, and the other tools being build up around the Bitcoin ecosystem. The power of giving developers simple tools and building blocks is often underestimated - but it often results in radical innovations. A case in point is Stripe's API, and the ecosystem that has been subsequently built around it. Yes, it's possible to send CC auths/settlements and ACH transactions yourself - but the barrier to entry stifles innovation. Often the most interesting innovations in tech occur when there's an innovation in tooling. I'm particularly interesting in Chain.com though, because I think currency is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Blockchains. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a number of other use-cases for Blockchains soon. [1] [1] - https://www.igvita.com/2014/05/05/minimum-viable-block-chain/ https://www.igvita.com/2014/05/05/minimum-viable-block-chain...

Adlai 12y ago

Why has nobody mentioned Obelisk? https://github.com/libbitcoin/obelisk https://github.com/libbitcoin/obelisk

yowmamasita 12y ago

What we need is a bitcoin sdk, not another 3rd-party rest api that will go down if business does not profit. Open source this!

k0mplex 12y ago
It will be open source, and will have SDKs, soon.
- sv123 12y ago
  Twice on Sundays.

kolev 12y ago

Decentralized systems always centralize in time.

lisperforlife 12y ago

I also found http://blockcypher.com http://blockcypher.com to be quite nice. In addition to the blockchain API, they also have APIs for creating transactions and even provide web sockets and web hooks. They do not host the wallet so you do not have to share your private key with them. They will create a transaction for you and you can then sign it with your private key. This is a good gateway for developers into the bitcoin system. The alternative is running bitcoind to download the 17 gig blockchain and then start coding. This provides instant gratification for developers to get started.

damethos 12y ago

To be honest I do not understand why this made it to the HN top posts when there are already other more complete APIs out there such as the Biteasy.com API. Good domain name though. Maybe that's why it made it up here?

wesley 12y ago

Would love if you guys added Nxt to this, it's completely different from bitcoind (it's based on java and a completely new codebase). If we had an API that would work across completely different systems, it would add great value. http://nxt.org http://nxt.org