I was curious how to obtain some of the info from public ledgers. Bitcoin for example or the site https://bitinfocharts.com It has the largest wallets as well as graph of the history on them. Do you need to download the entire blockchain and then query it or what exactly is the process for obtaining that info rather than directly off some of the existing websites? Same with Ethereum https://etherscan.io ? For Ethereum , same think of downloading the blockchain?
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Of course, if you want to know the balance for a certain address you need to know all the transactions that involved that address, and for doing that you need to have all the history of the transactions IE the blockchain.
Actually if you want to calculate the balance for an address you just need to know the last transaction and then, since every transaction links to the previous one, the previous transaction and so on recursively, but since you cannot predict where in the blockchain the transaction you'll need to retrive will be you must have the entire blockchain.
Moreover, if you want to find which address has the biggest balance the only way to do that is to calculate the balance of every single address, and again, you'll need the entire blockchain.
Carlo
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