At this point, you have certainly heard about Bitcoin. It’s the most famous crypto-currency which relies on a shared ledger to determine every account’s balance.
The network is made of clients that run the bitcoin protocol. Everyone can participate, but if you run a web app, it’s not trivial to also run a bitcoin client in order to look at transactions.
Several services, including the popular Blockchain.info provide JSON APIs which will yield information about a transaction or a Bitcoin address. Using our JSON fragment subscriptions, you can easily turn this into a webhook system and be notified when an specific address received a payment. This can be very useful when monitoring payments to your bitcoin addresses!
Let’s take an example. We create a new address and added to our bitcoin wallet: 1HLCuQ48xzZPYGUVbbWmdDwhdwpB1DK1Ss.
The Blockchain URL for this address includes transaction info, as well as balances.
Then, we wanted to be notified of the total amount of BTC received on that address, so we subscribed to https://blockchain.info/address/1HLCuQ48xzZPYGUVbbWmdDwhdwpB1DK1Ss?format=json#%24.total_received, because $.total_received includes the sum of all transactions sent to that address.
We used Webhookinbox to inspect the notifications, but obviously, we could have used any webhook to susbcribe to the updates to trigger other things!
Feel free to try it yourself: send a couple satoshis to 1HLCuQ48xzZPYGUVbbWmdDwhdwpB1DK1Ss, and then check this webhookinbox to make sure we received it… (you may have to wait a couple minutes for the transaction to be committed and for us to check that transation info URL!).
Comments