Bitcoin empowers people to truly own their money, but this comes at the cost of having to personally account for that money. Often times, people have multiple wallets and, of course, transact with many counter-parties (e.g merchants, exchanges, etc). Alone, this can be a hassle, but using Bitcoin day-to-day also involves tedious capital gains tracking. And if you get paid in Bitcoin, you need to track invoices and income. As a simple, local-first approach for the technically savvy, I believe PTA complements Bitcoin very well.
Hledger-Btc is a tool I made to bridge the gap. It allows you to scan the public ledger for your transactions, and writes them into your personal Hledger. You can configure multiple wallets, and import metadata, such as labels, from those wallets. The tool can also merge in external data from "feeds", such as a Lightning wallet or an exchange, to complete the double-entry record.
I made this as a personal tool but I hope the community finds value in it.
That's cool @brh28, thanks for sharing. It's something I wanted to see, PTA does seem potentially very useful in this space (especially with the new lots support in hledger).
What are your thoughts on the privacy/security risk of using off-chain infrastructure to make data queries ? It seems to leak information to whoever runs that infrastructure, and whoever hacks them, about your interest in cryptocurrency and in particular addresses.
Thanks for asking @simonmic. I actually just updated the docs with a short-note on this and added a couple issues for anyone wishing to contribute.
Yes, privacy is definitely a concern here for the reason you mention. However, it's an existing concern for anyone with a wallet. Best practice is to self-host the electrum server. I do this manually, but many (if not all) of the node-in-a-box providers include easy installation (e.g Fulcrum in Start9 registry, Electrs in Umbrel App Store).
There are also a couple unimplemented alternatives, which I've created issues for:
I see what you mean. I guess there's full-node wallets, like Daedalus and Electrum (?), which are more private, and light wallets (most wallets), which are less private.
Pretty much, yes. However, because Bitcoin's data throughput is lower than other chains, running a full node is easier & more common than other cryptos (e.g Cardano). Full nodes give you, not only better privacy, but the ability to independently verify the money you receive and that the rules of the system are being followed.
An electrum server typically requires the full blockchain, but if you have a new wallet, another potential alternative would be to run a pruned node and scan just the latest blocks. A pruned node strips old blocks and transactions, so you're left with just the active state and most recent blocks. Depending on how many blocks you keep, it costs ~25GB of storage. For comparison, a full node + electrum server needs at least 1TB.