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I put together balancebadge.com, a simple bitcoind related app. If I didn't use the chain.com API I would have had to run a server with bitcoind (~20GB of data)

I put together balancebadge.com, a simple bitcoind related app. If I didn't use the chain.com API I would have had to run a server with bitcoind (~20GB of data), a server that indexes data from bitcoind (recall that a simple address balance is not exposed in bitcoind), and stores the data in an alternate database (~200GB). There is no way that I would have built balancebadge if I had to setup and maintain 3 servers with 100s of gigabytes of data. Also, should developers who don't want to run a PostgreSQL server think twice about building web apps? I believe that general purpose software that requires server maintenance and state management should be run as a service. App developers should be focusing on the details of their product –not how to keep general purpose infrastructure alive and well. edit Full disclosure: I am one of the creators of chain.com

drdaeman 12y ago
Does one really need to keep the whole blockchain to perform basic things like tracking account balance? I'm not really savvy on the details, but from the overall understanding of how Bitcoin works I believe one should receive data, keep it until consensus is confirmed (blocks had matured for good, so unless the network went into really weird split-brain situation no "valid" branches would grow out from those blocks), then aggregate and throw data away. Keeping the whole transaction history up to genesis block seems nearly pointless to me. Not sure whenever bitcoind can do those, though. Seems that it keeps the whole blockchain, at least for seeding purposes. And, indeed, one would still need a database and running daemon that'd leech data from Bitcoin network. So, no way to have a badge on static HTML site. That's valid use case.