Querying the Blockchain

Ever wonder what's actually IN the Steem Blockchain?

I did and it seems pretty easy to find out. A good place to start is Steemd.com.

What did I learn from Steemd? It appears Steemit is hosted on Amazon (AWS) with images living on an S3 bucket. All pics are directly addressable with what looks like a REST API. I wonder who owns these Amazon accounts and pays the bills? This image repo could be handy for training some AI and ML algos one day (I see an R CRAN package in my future).

While Steemd offers some nice insight it doesn't really allow any querying or exploration of the blockchain (aggregation of the metadata).

Fortunately there seem to be some nice (well established) query gateways. Steemsql.com looks easy to use but I don't have a good SQL Client on my Mac. I'll leave this for another day.

I do however have Robomongo and Steemdata.com has a MongoDB API.

It's very easy to create a new connection.

Writting a query is then pretty simple. Here are all my entires in the Steem blockchain.

Who are the top 5 big influencers (most followers) right now?

Kudos to Mr (or Ms) @cryptoriddler, whoever you are.

And of course Ms @joanaltres, @always1success (nice pictures BTW), @jerrybanfield and @sweetsssj.

There's a lot more interesting meta data in here and I'll get round to exploring it a bit more in the coming weeks.

If you have any tips for me, pls leave me a comment.