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mempool
Explore the full Bitcoin ecosystem with mempool.space, or self-host your own instance with one-click installation on popular Raspberry Pi fullnode distros including Umbrel, Raspiblitz, Start9, and more!
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
You can run the Bitcoin software on your own laptop if you want, but for a complete picture, many of us run a node on a raspberry pi: https://github.com/rootzoll/raspiblitz/
If someone were to prove to you that they made a payment to an address, (eg. one of your own addresses), you can be assured that they didn't make an invalid or badly crafted transaction because you know that your node follows the Bitcoin rules and if the transaction shows up on your wallet connected to your node, then it must be legit. If you connect to a popular service or server (eg. use your wallet's default) then there is a greater risk of you seeing bad information because these servers are honeypots and an attacker could compromise that server in order to scam a bunch of unsuspecting victims. This point is maybe a bit of a stretch, but the idea of an attacker hijacking a commonly used server is more likely than them attacking a node that is used by only one user. A commonly known bitcoin explorer is https://mempool.space. It is definitely more likely that they would get compromised than your own node that no one knows about.