Node management and scaling

[misner]

Do you think it's possible to have aguess as to gitclout building from scratch + operating +scaling their blockchain node vs them using some big name (https://eos.io/, https://consensys.net/...)

There is https://www.blockcypher.com/ mentioned in your Readme but you seem to think it's only used for transactions and not for the whole blockchain backend...

What's your opinion or intuition on this ?

[misner]

and thanks for all the work and in-depth hunting:)

[scottstirling]

Hi @misner - thanks for asking and thanks for looking into it. my hunch and statements about it so far have been along these lines:

1. api.blockcypher.com is hidden and protected behind Cloudflare as is BitClout. Nothing wrong with that, but it does open up greater possibility of interactions beyond the superficial indicators we can see from outside.

2. BlockCypher.com offers a free open source blockchain explorer with a web interface and RDBMS in GitHub, referenced in one of the Issues in this project.

3. BitClout is an orchestration of APIs and vendors and license keys that none of us have any access to or control of; their technology is all highly derivative of other businesses and software projects. I consider it very likely that they bought a custom blockchain as a service from BlockCypher.com or another vendor.

4. A hypothesis I think worth testing would be to see whether the calls to api.blockcypher.com initialize a transaction and ID from the api.blockcypher.com front end which BitClout browser then sends to api.bitclout.com and then from Cloudflare or behind it, those calls and IDs are posted to unexposed / private endpoints served by a blockchain node hosting vendor such as blockcypher.com.

[misner]

Makes sense, thanks for the answer