Bitcoin balance lookup | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin balance lookup

duckduckgo.com

134 pointscharleyhine24 comments

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Here's the Fed's balance:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1Ez69SnzzmePmZX3WpEzMKTrcBF2gpNQ55

About ~$17.49m USD (as of June 13, 2014)

It would be nice if:

(1) You could do <address> in EUR... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1Ez69SnzzmePmZX3WpEzMKTrcBF2gpNQ55...

(2) It auto-converted to a reasonable default currency for your country, based upon IP address.

FYI, does not play nice with DDG's dark theme.

Thanks! We're working on making these instant answers look better with different themes.

You should incorporate firstbits into the system as well. That will make it very handy and better than most current online tools. Instead of remembering a whole Bitcoin address, the first 6-7 characters would do. Will make usability better as well (I know there's debate about whether firstbits are good or evil, but it would still be interesting to include that feature).

What would it do if multiple addresses share those bits?

  Any time a Bitcoin address is used for transactional purposes and appears in the
  block chain, its firstbits - or the prefix that uniquely identifies that address
  within the block chain - are considered assigned at that time. If another address
  is created and used with the same prefix at a later time, the firstbits of that
  new address will be at least one character longer, as the shorter prefix remains
  reserved for the address that used it first.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Firstbits

Ah, that's pretty cool. Otherwise you can use things like vanitygen to create a similar address. I just created https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1NhLgwwuiyVsBuk3NgJHDztZZ6ejBySbsj

The Bitcoin wiki seems to view firstbits as a very negative thing. From a quick reading, it looks like yet another "Real Names" attempt, but this time for bitcoin addresses.

The wiki even says the founder of firstbits went around generating a bunch of addresses to get the "good ones".

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Firstbits

That's not really their utility though. The value of firstbits is that you just type the first few bits of the address you want to look up and hit enter. It's like auto-complete.

Except it depends on that address being previously used. Otherwise people can attack it by entering a shorter prefix leading to another wallet. If I know you're gonna send to 1234567890, I'll go register 1234567899, so if you just type in 12345, it hits my account.

I use https://blockchain.info/search/%s with keyword "bit" in Chrome, so I can "bit SOMEHASH" from the omnibox and it searches more than just address balances (transactions, etc)

This is pretty nice. Are you planning to spread the integration out to other popular cryptos as well?

Uhm, it shows "no more results" on my system. Maybe the change is being propagated?

You might need to enable "Open Instant Answers" in Settings / Results.

Is there a !-shortcut as well?

I don't think they could make it any shorter than typing in the address. Using a !bang would just make it longer.

The only way that I can think of to make it shorter would be typing x chars from the address and it would list balances from all matching addresses using auto complete (it probably only need a short part of the address to be unique) but of course most people probably use copy and paste and it would not matter

Ah didn't realize it would recognize Bitcoin addresses automatically.

You can use !bc to jump to a blockchain.info search.

And where's Doge balance lookup? :P

Great.... Now what? You've advertised the integration of an API on HN. Now what?

cool

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