A block explorer is an online browser for viewing or “exploring” all of the information on the bitcoin blockchain. With a block explorer, you can view address balances, transactions, transactions fees, the congestion of the MemPool, the number of daily transactions, current and past block rewards, the current mining difficulty, the flow of bitcoin and even view the value of bitcoin when it was transacted compared to today’s price. In short, block explorers are for exploring all of the information in the blocks on the blockchain.

Why Are Block Explorers Important?

Block explorers are an incredibly important tool because they allow everyone to view the transactions that are publically available on the blockchain. If you need to look up the balance of an address, the details of a given transaction, or maybe just want to explore a blockchain, in general, you will need a block explorer to do so.

How To Use A Block Explorer

Block explorers are primarily used for looking up addresses and TXIDs (Transaction IDs) but you can use them to look at all sorts of information. If you want to view the balance of an address, all you need to do is copy and paste it into the search bar of a block explorer. Depending on the block explorer that you are using, it will show you all of the relevant data about the corresponding address, every transaction in and out, what time each transaction was sent/received, the confirmations of each transaction, the miner fee for each transaction, and more.

Mempool.Space

Mempool.Space is a tool for viewing how many transactions are waiting to be included in the next block but it also has a very user-friendly interface that makes it easy to understand.

Why don’t you try to use the MemPool.Space Block explorer to look of some of the information that I have below.

Looking Up A Bitcoin Address

If you want to view the balance of any bitcoin address, you will need to use a block explorer. You can do this simply by copying and pasting the desired address in any of the block explorers listed below.

Why don’t you give it a try with this address: 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa

Looking Up A TxID or “Hash”

You can also use a block explorer to look up information on any specific bitcoin transaction. All you need to do is copy and paste the TxID of the transaction you want to look up in any of the block explorers listed below.

Why don’t you give it a try with this TxID: 4a5e1e4baab89f3a32518a88c31bc87f618f76673e2cc77ab2127b7afdeda33b

Looking Up Miner Fees

If you want to know how much bitcoin was used to send a transaction, you can look at the miner fees in each transaction. When you look up the TxID, you should be able to see the miner fee listed on the page. Not all block explorers will give as much info as others so you might have to toggle some things on in order to view the miner fee in USD or perhaps in your local fiat currency.

Try to find the miner fee for this TxID: dc6d125930bab48766b84933de3d99e1937508fe2ec8cdda985bd0f83159da6e

Looking Up A Block

Looking up an entire block is just as easy as looking up most of the items listed above. If you know the block, just search in a block explorer and you should be able to view all of the relevant data for that block.

Why don’t you try to look up this block: 500000

OXT.me

OXT.me is a newer block explorer and short for Other eXploration Tool and is a relatively new block explorer. Instead of focusing on all sorts of confusing data on the blockchain, OXT has taken a more streamlined approach by making things easy to understand by showing a simple graph. They also provide some more in-depth metrics but they market themselves as the block explorer by the people, for the people.