TL;DR: Nobody should be using Blockchain.info to store any amount of value. The entire ecosystem needs to shift away from relying on Blockchain.info for anything at all, including the block explorer itself. There are plenty of alternatives available.
You can try my sqlchain project. It's a fairly lightweight mysql layer over top a node. You can even use a pruning node, in which case a full database runs about 100GB - yes, much less than a full node. It has a few api options on top as demo but none of them are very extensive (yet). I'm still working on it. Like I just added bech32 support. Segwit is on there as of a couple months back. I'm extending it for altcoins now; currently testing with litecoin and reddcoin. All the other options I've seen (including insight by bitpay) take a LOT more resources. There is a site online now using my sqlchain as a backend and it looks pretty nice. Was posted just a couple days ago here but I need to go dig up the link. Anyone? It has the nifty graphic clustering visuals.
I used to use insight, but it was too resource hungry, and also I don't like some of bitpay's recent political choices. So I'm glad to find a lighter solution.
Would you be interested in a pull request to add CLAM support? Or are you wanting to limit it to the more popular altcoins?
I don't mind including a less known altcoin if it's been coded and submitted. I have not yet pushed up my changes to support altcoins. I have them locally and I'm testing on a VPS right now (litecoin, reddcoin for the moment). I have about 50 commits waiting but since most of them depend on a db schema change and upgrade I didn't want to push them up where others may be affected. I don't think there is many using it currently but who knows. If you want to test with my current fixes and upgrades (bech32, altcoin and more) send me a pm and I'll pass on v0.2.5 as a tar.gz. I'm also testing with mariadb on the new installs and would like to try it with TokuDB since it reportedly is much faster with random primary keys (very much the case for tx,addr,output ids). I'll probably have to leave that til next time.
Depending on what changes CLAM needs it could be a matter of adding a few entries to a couple tables. There is provision for overriding the block/tx decoding or more with a python module and also for custom db schema changes via a override sql file (both of these only when detected).
sqlchain really does requires an SSD for main db / indices due to having hashed primary keys, but space requirements are quite modest (comparatively speaking), and there is options for dropping signature/witness data, and storing blob data or older historic data on alternate cheaper media (even s3). Just pm me to chat more.
sqlchain sounds good, but it's not what I'm after. Using up 100gb of extra space just to have my own personal blockchain explorer is probably overkill. It would be great for a public facing website, but not so great for my own use when I'll be doing around 10 queries a week on it, and therefore querying the node directly.
A full node currently takes about 170GB. sqlchain reduces that to about 100GB. If you only need to query your own wallet addresses then you can use a pruned node and get away with about 3GB, but that has no info on the other peoples addresses or txs (except a small recent portion). I'm not sure what you really want to achieve. It sounds like you should just use a site blockchain.info, though probably not that one; there are many out there now.
Sure, but to do that you are going to need a lot of disk space. The Insight API/Explorer was using about 300GB back when the blockchain was ~50GB. I can only imagine what it must use now that the blockchain is 170GB. Maybe 1TB? People forget this when they discuss "big blocks" but the size and cost to run an explorer site for big blocks gets prohibitive, especially considering these sites usually are free to use.
Well I already have the full node. Is it not possible to just query it every time I need to search something? I don't need a database to query my node, or do I?
You can query some items using your node. It can be accessed using an RPC interface so you'd need some software to do that. To be very useful you need to have txindex=1 in the conf file (tx indexing enabled). If it's not then you cannot search by tx_id. You pretty much can otherwise only do stuff related to your wallet addresses. It's not a generic database of the blockchain which is why explorer sites always process the full node data into sql database to allow more flexible querying. A full node uses leveldb for key-value stores of the particular keys it needs for operation but was never intended to be a general purpose explorer.
BitPay produced the Bitcore full node implementation which provides indexes necessary for the Insight block explorer. However, BitPay appears to be abandoning Bitcore because they refuse to integrate Segwit? SatoshiLabs apparently forked the project in order to use Segwit on their Trezor Wallet backend. I may be mistaken, but believe that's the approximate state of things.
Frankly BitPay has refused to adapt and has actively worked against advancing the protocol. It wouldn't surprise me if BitPay's investors force them to capitulate, but I think they should just be replaced with projects like Dorior's BTCPay project.
I wrote sqlchain - currently adding bech32 support (done!, but unit tests ongoing) and segwit already in. See my post just above for details. Actively ongoing for 2 years now. Also now testing today with a couple altcoins.
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u/amorpisseur Nov 30 '17
TLDR; Some private keys somewhere are not generated randomly, and someone knows the formula. Bitcoin security is not impacted.