The bitcoin space is full of useful tools. Some tools are for buying bitcoin. Some are for accepting bitcoin as payment. Others are for looking at bitcoin transactions on the blockchain. Well, in this article, we’ll be discussing a tool that can perform a number of these functions and it can do it all without the need for your personal information. We’re talking about Blockonomics.
The Blockonomics Block Explorer
There are a number of block explorers to chose from when you need to look up information on the blockchain but not all of them are as easy to understand as you would like. All sorts of numbers and letters all over the screen can make it difficult to fully understand what is going in. Blockonomics seems to understand this which is why their block explorer is much easier to read than most. Instead of more technical looking explorer, they provide an interface that is a bit easier to understand.
Address Watcher
Sometimes keeping track of all of your bitcoin addresses can be a bit labor intensive. You might have a hardware wallet that you use to keep all of your savings in and a desktop wallet for trading and a few paper wallets as backups here and there. If you want to keep track of the balances of all of these different wallets across different devices, an address watcher is just the tool for you.
Here are some of the ways that you can use the address watcher to keep an eye on various different addresses.
Watching Your Own Addresses
Since most wallets generate a new address for each new payment that you receive, it won’t take long for you to have bitcoin strewn across dozens of addresses.
You can use the address watcher to keep track of different types of finances or businesses and you don’t have to log in to multiple platforms to see the cumulative value of all of them.
Here are a few different applications for using the address watcher tool:
– Keeping track of all of your deposit addresses across the multiple exchanges that you trade on so you can easily view transaction history in a single location.
– Watching the balances of different addresses that you use for different things such as businesses expenses, living expenses
– If you have multiple donation addresses and you want to know how much you have between all of them.
– If you receive payouts from ads, watching all of the different addresses that you accept these payments at is much easier from a single dashboard.
Watching Other Addresses
If you don’t have the need to watch your own addresses because you keep all of your bitcoin in a single wallet, you might still want to watch other addresses that are not yours.
Here’s a few different ways you could use Blockonomics to watch addresses that aren’t yours.
– Watching master addresses for exchanges, casinos or payment processors to see how much volume they process.
– If you were hacked and lost bitcoin, maybe you want to watch the address that your stolen funds were sent to and receive an email notification when they moved out of that address.
– Perhaps you want to build a list of all of the addresses believed to be owned by Satoshi Nakamoto and you want to see the cumulative value of all of those addresses.
– If you want to watch an address that is public on someones social media profile to see how many donations they receive.
– Watching the address for a known charity or non-profit organization and you want to see how many donations they receive.
There are probably a number of other applications for watching addresses that aren’t yours. If you can think of any, let us know with a tweet to @WhatIsBitcoin
To sum things up, watching multiple addresses in a single location can make accounting for things and making educated decisions much less labor intensive.
Address Tags
If you watch lots of addresses, it can easily become difficult to tell which ones are which. This is where address tags come in. The address watcher allows you to tag each address that you add so you can filter different groups of addresses. We use tags all the time to follow various expenses and referral payout deposits.
How would you tag different addresses?
Address History
Since we live in an increasingly visual world with infographics and visual data, Blockonomics has created a tool that allows you to view a historical chart of all of the transactions for an address or group of addresses within the last 3 months. This can make it incredibly easy to see business growth, view credits and debits to addresses all from a single dashboard.
Email Notifications For Address Activity
If you don’t want to constantly have to check back all the time to see which addresses have moved bitcoin, you can subscribe to email alerts to notify you when bitcoin is sent to or from an address. Maybe you have a donation address on your website and want to get notified when you receive a donation or perhaps you want to receive notifications whenever one of your payment invoices has been paid or one of your payment buttons has received a payment.
Transaction Fee Calculator
When you are sending bitcoin, knowing how much of a miner fee that you should attach to your transaction can be incredibly important so that it doesn’t get stuck in the MemPool. With the Blockonomics transaction calculator, you can calculate the miner fee before you send your transaction.
Most wallets these days have dynamic miner fee calculations that take place directly within the wallet but for wallets that do not yet have this feature, this can be a valuable tool.
Blockonomics Merchant Tools
In order for bitcoin to gain mainstream adoption, we need more merchants accepting it as an actual medium of exchange. Blockonomics merchant tools are a great way for individuals and businesses to get started accepting bitcoin on websites or by manually sending invoices. One of the biggest obstacles with merchant adoption is the lack of tools for businesses and freelancers to sell their products for bitcoin.
Blockonomics has a suite of tools that helps to solve this problem. Let’s look at each one of them in more detail.
Invoice Creator
This feature is one of my favorites since it allows you to make bitcoin requests at a fixed fiat rate regardless of the current price of Bitcoin. This can be incredibly helpful for someone who wants to accept bitcoin as payment and doesn’t want to constantly have to change bitcoin payment requests when the price moves.
For instance, you might sell a product or service and want to accept bitcoin as payment but with the volatility of bitcoin against fiat currencies, you can’t effectively use bitcoin payment requests within your wallet since you might invoice when the price of bitcoin is at $3,500 and the price could swing 10% up or down. In either case, you or your customer would end up losing out.
The invoice generator solves this problem.
You can create an invoice in your local fiat currency and send it to someone and it will create a new payment BTC payment request every 10 minutes for that address. This protects you and your buyer from any drastic price swings.
The ability to price your goods and services in fiat is incredibly valuable until bitcoin is able to function as a unit of account all by itself.
Payment Buttons
If you don’t have the need to create invoices in bitcoin, the payment buttons mught be a bit more helpful. Maybe you have a web store and you want to set up a way to receive bitcoin payments online without having to create an invoice for each order. Thats where the Blockonomics payment buttons come in handy.
Blockonomics has a free WordPress plugin tool that integrates with WooCommerce stores so you can begin accepting bitcoin payments directly on your website with minimal hassle.
Payment Forwarding Service
This is a newer feature that has been added to enable their users to automatically send their BTC earnings to an exchange address so that it can be converted into fiat.
Earn Bitcoin With Blockonomics
Not only does Blockonomics offer all of the above services, it goes even further to help grow the bitcoin space by enabling anyone to earn bitcoin with a referral program. Since this site earns revenue from affiliate and referral links we are especially fond of this feature. Let’s go into some detail on how the program works.
The Blockonomics Referral Program
In order to earn bitcoin with Blockonomics, you need to create an account and get your affiliate link. Affiliates are able to earn a 30% commission of the Blockonomics fee for referring new users to the platform. Since Blockonomics charges a 1% fee for using their merchant tools, you can earn .3% of every transaction that your referrals generate.
For example, if you refer a user or store that processes $10,000 USD worth of transactions on Blockonomics, the 1% fee would be $100 USD and you would earn $30. This referral commission is for life so there isn’t a time limitation on how long you can make money with referrals.
What’s even more amazing about this is feature is that it does not require any personal information. With Blockonomics, anyone in the world with an internet connection has the opportunity to start earning bitcoin today and they don’t even need a bank account. That’s pretty powerful.
The Downside of Blockonomics
As awesome as Blockonomics is, it is not without its shortcomings. While I really like this tool, I wish that it did a few more things or at least do a few things differently. Let’s touch on each one.
Block Explorer Limits
While it isn’t common for most addresses to have more than a single deposit, some addresses have had multiple deposits and some of these addresses have had hundreds or even more than a thousand deposits. Blockonomics currently has a limit of only showing the past 200 transactions for any given address. This may not seem like an important feature but if you want to look at addresses like the Genesis address or other addresses with lots of incoming transactions, you aren’t able to do so.
If you look up this address 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa with Blockonomics, you will see that is only lists the balance based on the last 200 transactions. If you look at this same address in most other block explorers, you can see that the balance is actually much higher than what Blockonomics shows. I am sure that is because it requires more resources to look back that far on the blockchain.
Again, it isn’t very common at all to have this many transactions at a single address because most wallet these days are HD (they have implemented BIP 32) and automatically generate a new address after each payment.
3 Month Historical Graphs
SinceI really like visual graphs and data visualization, I wish that I could see transaction data for more than just the past 3 months. I personally have some addresses that are more than 3 months old and I am unable to see any transactions on the graph for those addresses. It would be cool if I could see all of the transactions for the life of the address but I understand that this may require more resources from the Blockonomics team.
Final Thoughts
Blockonomics is a great tool for a number of reasons. You can use it for exploring the blockchain to look at address balances, TxIDs and even xPub keys. You can generate bitcoin invoices that are pegged to your local fiat currency, create payment buttons for your WordPress site, watch addresses that are yours or just random addresses on the blockchain and receive email notifications whenever an address sends or receives a transaction. Overall, it’s a pretty powerful tool and their freemium business model makes it easy to get started for free.
If you are looking for a tool that enables you to get started accepting bitcoin payments, we strongly encourage you to do some experimenting with Blockonomics and let us know what you think.