Show HN: Post Bitcoin transactions in one page of JS code

mriou 12 years ago |

The full API documentation can be found there:

http://dev.blockcypher.com/

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

wmf 12 years ago |

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

mriou 12 years ago | |

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.

wmf 12 years ago | | |

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?

mriou 12 years ago | | |

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...).

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.

alexism 12 years ago |

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

CatheryneN 12 years ago | |

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.