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I use web3 and I would like to know when somebody sent me any kind of ERC20 token. With web3, I can get the "to" and the "input" fields. With the "to", I get the contract address. With the "input", I get the recipient and the number of tokens transferred. Then, I want to spend those tokens. For that I need to connect to the contract so I need the ABI.
My questions: where can I find the ABI since I don't have the contract source ? It is possible to find the contract source ?
If you have the Ethereum address, you can go here: http://etherscan.io to get a list of all transactions and, if the person/people who wrote the smart contract posted such, you can get both the source code and the ABI.
The only trouble that I've had with this approach, and it's only a philosophical one, is that this is centralized. A better approach would be a fully decentralized source of this same information. I believe the people working in the ENS (http://ens.domains/) are working on this functionality, but I don't think it's yet available (or if it is, it's not widely implemented).
