it would take several minutes to download this csv file
I don't really mind waiting a few minutes for certain things. In fact, I often
download 800 MB just to check a few addresses. A better system would be to only download changes after the initial download, so it would be much faster.
This is a whole different setup and a whole different tool. I will think about an approach to do this, with databases.
I can get the balance of any address in just one or two seconds
When I tested your site with 30 addresses, I got only 9 results. It was fast, but incomplete. But what if you want to check 10 million addresses? Or even just 10 thousand? As far as I know, there isn't a single website that can do this, while there are already a lot of websites that tell you the balance of one (or a few) addresses.
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THanks for your input.
I just tested with 50+ address and got it in a few seconds as well. I added also a timer, to avoid being IP Blocked.
The search is instantaneous, but I added 1 second between each address so you don't get blocked.
The code is better now, I added a condition when the address is in invalid (this might had been bugging in same cases like the one you said).
Can you try again? You can try with hundreds or a thousand addresses, it should work.
I think that if you try with a million address you may get IP banned from sochain (not from my website).
When I do a local search to find matching addresses, it doesn't really matter much for the search time whether it's 1 or a million addresses. I'm pretty sure using a database would be much faster to get one address, but I don't know if it can beat the speed of searching a text-file for a million matches.
TXT search speed is ok. THe problem is downloading the database. I would like to avoid that. I will try to figure something out.
I'm pretty sure most people who want to get balances of (say) a million addresses are trying to brute-force private keys. That means checking
All Bitcoin addresses ever used to keep any private key that has ever been used. I know there are people who brute-force for instance brain wallets, but I don't know what they use to check the address history for many (millions of) addresses per second.
I would like at first to make a tool to check addresses.
Now I will think about this problem of checking addresses with privacy, which means not sending specific addresses requests to a server.
There are many approaches that could be used (for example, downloading a list of addresses with the first 5 matching characters only, reducing 99,9% the download speed). Or downloading everything.
But I would not like to make a tool that would help people brute force addresses...