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Bithypha is free to use, but not free for us to host of-course. At the moment it's just a hobby project, but we hope to eventually run on donations (or sponsors maybe) similar to mempool.space.
Understand. Its just that all your friends here on SN want you to be safe and not make you have to choose between spending the rest of your life in a room with 100 heavily tattood dudes in an undisclosed location in El Salvador or passing on the access logs to the feds for ip a or address b.
It may be an idea to just open source things, then those whose IP or Bitcoin addresses are actually interesting can just run their own instance and perhaps save you some time answering subpoenas.
That's definitely true, but we are still thinking about making it open-source. The problem we have with making it open-source is that we spent a lot of time to build a highly efficient backend written in Rust that can do very complex tasks with (for blockchain analysis standards) minimum hardware requirements. Which we think might also be very interesting for companies like Chainalysis that suffer from technical debt.
Chainalysis or other companies claiming some parts of the code, would be acceptable to us if making Bithypha open-source would still help the bitcoin community. But even though we made the backend very efficient and fast, in order to achieve that, it needs a lot of RAM. So much that to run the backend you need more RAM than the 192GB limit that most consumer hardware can handle. So we are a bit afraid that if we make it open-source, it would help those companies, while it wouldn't be useful for the bitcoin community.
For now we decided to keep it closed source, that might change in the future once we have a version that can run on an NVMe SSD for example but we can't make any promises sadly.
For the time being if you want to use Bithypha you need to either trust us or not look up your own addresses (or use vpn/tor), just like with other block explorers.
For what it's worth Bithypha is at-least not owned by an analysis company. Contrary to walletexplorer.com for example, which is used by Chainalysis to scrape users IP-addresses: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/09/21/leaked-slides-show-how-chainalysis-flags-crypto-suspects-for-cops
i hadn't heard the willy variation before. at first I thought you meant something different than the dolphin...
I don't remember who I stole it from but do remember I thought the same, so it stuck.
Exactly. Theirs is free as in beer, not as in willy.