Tor Browser shouldn't ship blockchair by default

According to @JeremyRand (who just wrote this on IRC):

why is Blockchair even in Tor Browser...? Block explorers are useful as a debugging tool, but I don't think Tor Browser ships any other debugging tools as search engines. There are plenty of documented cases of bad actors running block explorers, either to do surveillance or to defraud people.

People who actually need to check on the status of a transaction should (at the very least) be using a local Electrum-based client that actually does some meaningful verification of the data it's displaying.

I would be supportive of removing any block explorers from Tor Browser's default search engine list. The users who legitimately need an explorer as a debugging/dev tool are sophisticated enough to know how to add it to the search engine list themselves.

ICYMI there was a large explorer-related scandal in the news a few months ago because it turned out that a large explorer was covertly being run by Chainalysis and was reporting all its traffic to law enforcement

the basic idea of an explorer is: you're waiting for a Bitcoin transaction to arrive before you ship goods to the buyer. If you're competent, you use a Bitcoin wallet that actually checks whether you have the Bitcoins in your hand. Or if you're not competent, you go to an explorer website, where you type in the transaction hash, and it tells you whether you're good to ship the goods. If the explorer is fraudulent,

it can tell you that you have the money, even though you don't, and then you ship the goods and lose your money.

also if you search for two different transactions on an explorer without clicking New Identity, now it knows that the same person received both transactions.

And at least one major explorer was reporting such intel to law enforcement

explorers are very useful for debugging, because they let you look up historical transactions by hash and address. I use them all the time when I'm writing blockchain code. But the vast majority of traffic to explorers is incompetent users checking whether they've received money.