Crypto Academy Season 3 Beginners' course - Homework Post for Task 2: Block Explorer
Greetings Professor @yousafharoonkhan, I am very happy to get back to your homework in this new season.
(3) What is a block explorer? And what is its purpose and use? Search for different cryptocurrency block explorers and list them below. At least five different crypyo currencies. Also explore the transaction of a crypto coin on block explorer and explain with the help of screenshot.
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The block explorer is basically a platform that allows us to search the contents of the blockchain that we want to see. This platform is like the Google of cryptocurrencies since we will find everything we need to know about a certain blockchain.
When a transfer is made with cryptocurrencies or based on a blockchain, the data remains registered and protected in the blockchain. The people who send and those who receive can see this information without being able to modify it, which ensures the transparency and reliability of the process and generates trust among users without proving their identity within the network. Anyone who is not involved in the transaction can enter the block explorers and observe the registered information, but they will not know the identity of the people involved in the transfer, which gives them the name of pseudo-anonymous to many blockchains.
There are many block explorers and many times there is more than one explorer for a single blockchain. If a user knows how to use a block explorer, he knows how to use them all, since they are quite easy to use tools and help to understand how blockchains are organized and work. The information stored in block explorers is structured by addresses, transactions, or by blocks.
There are many things a user can do with block explorers, including tracking information about recent block mining, history of trades, as well as finding the first mined block on a blockchain called *Genesis block *
The use will always depend on the user, although on average it is only used to see the evolution of a transfer I will show you easy examples that explain the use of a block explorer.
• Track the origin of a cryptocurrency: As you all know, traditional services only allow users to explore their own transfers, a public blockchain allows you to see the transactions of any wallet address.
Example with the address: bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh
We can observe all the data and transfers associated with that address.
• See the status of a transfer: You can use the block explorer to check pending and completed transfers, we can also see the number of confirmations. Confirmation means that the transfer has been processed and the chances of it being reversed are practically non-existent.
Each cryptocurrency has a certain number of confirmations to complete a transaction, although there can be several depending on the platform that is used. For example, Coinbase requires three confirmations to approve a BTC transaction, on the other hand, it requires 35 confirmation with the ETH cryptocurrency.
Exchanges often have a number of confirmations required to show the balance on the balance sheet, these confirmations can vary by currency.
• Check the average commission rates per operation: Cryptocurrency mining is often difficult and sometimes easy, this is directly reflected in the commissions charged when making a transfer. The more difficult the mining, the more expensive the transfer will be and otherwise the commissions will be low. Although today there are blockchains where commissions are almost non-existent, we have blockchains like Ethereum where commissions of more than $ 100 have been seen, so the use of the blockchain to verify these prices is a good option that we must use before making the transfer.
Next, I show you two BTC transactions, in one 34 BTC is sent and in the other 0.00047 BTC, we can see a difference in the commission costs, so we can say that the cost of the commission is directly related to the amount of BTC being sent. The more BTC is sent, the more expensive the commission
| Cryptocurrency | Block Explorer |
|---|---|
| Litecoin | LTC Explorer |
| Solana | SOL Explorer |
| Nano | NANO Explorer |
| VeChain | VET Explorer |
| TRON | TRX Explorer |
-In this transfer we can see the following information:
• Status: Here it informs us if the transfer is confirmed by the network or not and it tells us the number of confirmations it has.
• ID: It is the identification number assigned for the transfer by the blockchain, this number is unique and a new one is generated for each transfer.
• Timestamp: It is the exact time in which the transfer was executed
• Clauses: The VeChain blockchain allows payment in groups, that is, you can execute a transfer that is destined for different addresses, the Clauses are the number of addresses grouped in the same transfer. In this case there is only one Clauses, so there is only one shipping address.
• Total Transfer: It is the total amount of VET sent.
• Gas Used: It is the gas used to pay for the transfer.
• Origin: It is the address from where the coins are sent.
• Fee: It is the commission paid to execute the transfer, here we can see that it informs that it was paid by the user who sends the coins.
• Token Transferred: Here we see a small summary of the steps that were followed to complete the transfer.
• Size: It is the size of the block expressed in bytes
• Reward: They are the rewards that are given to the miner for their work on the blockchain.
• BlockRef: It is the number of the block created, this is also assigned a unique ID
• Expiration: This is a number expressed in bytes that defines the expiration time of the transaction
• Nonce: It is a number set by the user who performs the transfer
• Depends On: In case the transfer depends on a different transfer, a unique ID number will be created. In this case the transfer does not depend on anything so no ID is reflected
• Chain Tag: It is the last byte of the ID of the Genesis block, this is used to avoid the reproduction of transfers between chains.
As you can see, the uses that a block explorer can be given are a bit more advanced than many would think, explorers are a vital part of blockchains and represent a fundamental part of the decentralization of cryptocurrencies, in terms of In particular, I would not trust any cryptocurrency that does not have a browser.