The Power of a Blockchain Explorer & How You Can Use it To Find Out The Truth About A Crypto Asset
If you are new to the Cryptocurrency market you should be familiar with the term “Block Explorer”. At first Blockchain Explorers and the information on there might seem confusing or hard to navigate, but once you master this tool you’ll know how powerful it is in the cryptocurrency marketplace.
Take a short journey that will help you understand what is Blockchain Explorer aka Block Explorer, how it works and how to use Block Explorers to your advantage.
What are Blockchain Explorers:
All truly decentralized public Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano and many other Altcoins out there rely on blockchain explorers to conduct & reveal transactions.
Blockchain is an encryption technology that records transaction data. Blockchain is immutable, distributed, decentralized and a secure digital ledger.
As this digital information is accessible to anyone on the internet it becomes transparent and incorruptible.
Think of blockchain explorers as digital stones where transactions can only be added, but not removed. Anybody can check the balance of any public address and anyone can view any transaction details on the blockchain. How? By using block explorers.
Block explorer is a website or a tool that allows one to browse through blocks, view wallet addresses, network hashrate, transaction data and other key information on the blockchain.
Block Explorer is simply a search tool. Just like how you use web browsers to browse through the Internet; block explorers allows one to browse the blockchain.
For example using Dogecoin block explorers, you’ll not be able explore the chain of Bitcoin, Ethereum or Litecoin. For Ethereum you’ll need a Ethereum block explorer and for Litecoin you have to use Litecoin explorer.
How To Use Blockchain Explorers:
While navigating the Blockchain Explorer you’ll notice that this page displays valuable information about a block that you are looking at specifically.
When you explore a particular block most show a summary of the block and its transactions. Summary usually display information like this:
- Number of transactions on the block
- Estimated transaction volume
- Transaction fees
- Total coins that was transacted
- Block reward, weight, size, version
- Who mined the block
- When the block was mined
- Hash of the current block
- Hash of previous block and hash of next block
Rich List:
One of the more useful examples of how Blockchain explorers are used is to search any information regarding major bag holders aka whales, who can really affect coin price in the cryptocurrency you are in.
Till this day you can even navigate to the first dogecoin block that was mined in 2013. You can check the genesis block difficulty, wallet address that mined it and the reward.
To find the genesis block just type 1 in search bar of block explorer and it will display the information of block height #1.
Ever wondered which Dogecoin address holds the largest amount of dogecoin. Using block explorer you can check the most popular address by the number of outputs and the top 100 richest Dogecoin addresses.
But take into account that not all explorers provide this option and features like this won’t be available on privacy coins like Monero.
Overall blockchain explorers are great tools to utilize in order to verify information, and claims that are made about your favorite cryptocurrency.
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