Bitcoin blockchain parser python
It looks like bitcoind omits the magic number and blocksize entries, and if we look at the block header specification which can be found here then we can see that this all appears to make sense, and breaks down as follows:. This is mostly straightforward, but one detail bitcoin blockchain parser python note is that transaction byte sizes are not explicitly included, and we have to at least minimally parse each transaction in order to figure out where individual transactions end. There's a network query and response required for each transactionfor starters, and then bitcoind is also being forced to fully decode all of the transaction details provided by the gettransaction RPC command regardless of whether or not we actually use these details, and everything passed in and out of these bitcoin blockchain parser python is getting encoded to and decoded from JSON, in each directions, all of which adds to the time overhead. In general, it seems like the best place to look for RPC command documentation is in the corresponding source code, not the wiki!
With SwapBill potentially relevant transactions can be trivially identified from raw transaction data, and most non-SwapBill transactions are then quickly discarded without any further decoding. This is mostly bitcoin blockchain parser python, but one detail to note is that transaction byte sizes are not explicitly included, and we have to at least minimally parse each transaction in order to figure out where individual transactions end. This will help out to a certain extent, since bitcoind no longer has to decode the whole transaction, and pass all of the elements through JSON and over the network. June 20,2: Look for bitcoin blockchain parser python files starting with an 'rpc' prefix.
So one way to approach this is to make a call to the 'getblock' RPC command, first of all, and then iterate over the transaction IDs returned by this command to submit additional queries for information about each of these transactions:. The specification for bitcoin variable length integers can be found hereand we can write python code to decode this as follows:. A key piece of information is that, although currently undocumented in the wiki, the getblock RPC command actually accepts a second 'verbose' parameter. For certain bitcoin applications you'll need to perform some kind of processing on all of the transactions coming through on the bitcoin block chain.
And let's then assume that we have a block hash for the block we need to process, and just want to process all the transactions in this block. This will help out to a certain extent, since bitcoind no longer has to decode the whole transaction, and pass all of the elements through JSON and over the network. A key piece of information is that, although currently undocumented in the wiki, the getblock RPC command actually accepts a second 'verbose' bitcoin blockchain parser python.
June 20,2: We can find the transaction data specificiation hereand there's also some useful additional discussion about transaction format in that Ken Shirriff blog bitcoin blockchain parser python. Bitcoind accepts a txindex option to control whether or not a full transaction index is created and maintained, and by default this will be turned off. We'll use the RPCHost class from this previous post. The transaction index bitcoin blockchain parser python is kind of irritating in our case, because we actually know the block hash containing the transaction, and so we could theoretically just tell this to bitcoind.
Transaction indexing is required in order for bitcoind to get from the transaction hash to the actual transaction data in the blockchain, but bitcoind doesn't actually normally need to be able to look up all of the transactions in the blockchain history. This approach to scanning the blockchain is used in the SwapBill embedded protocol bitcoin blockchain parser python results in a particularly big speedup in this specific case. I'm not going to look at logic for choosing which blocks to add, and bitcoin blockchain parser python, but may come back to talk about this in a future post. The raw bytes for each bitcoin blockchain parser python are included directly in each block, and if we're already decoding raw transaction data then decoding the block itself in order to locate these transactions isn't a lot harder. It looks like bitcoind omits the magic number and blocksize entries, and if we look at the block header specification which can be found here then we can see that this all appears to make sense, and breaks down as follows:.
So one way to approach this is to make a call to the 'getblock' RPC command, first of all, and then iterate over the transaction IDs returned by this command to submit additional queries for information about each of these transactions:. The first problem is that calling bitcoin blockchain parser python for arbitrary transactions requires a full transaction index. Once a transaction's outputs have bitcoin blockchain parser python spent, bitcoind can pretty much forget about that transaction, and indexing all of those old, spent transactions has non-negligeable cost, so it's good to be able to discard that information. This approach to scanning the blockchain is used in the SwapBill embedded protocol and results in a particularly big speedup in this specific case. With SwapBill potentially relevant transactions can be trivially identified from raw transaction data, and most non-SwapBill transactions are then quickly discarded without any further decoding.
In this case we want rpcblockchain. Note that we'll need to convert from hex encoded string data as returned from the getblock RPC call to bytes. I'm not going to look at logic for choosing which blocks to add, and when, but may come back to talk about this in a future post.
Transaction indexing is required in order for bitcoind to get from the transaction hash to the actual transaction data in the blockchain, but bitcoind doesn't actually normally need to be able to look up all of the transactions in the blockchain history. This gives us a some extra work to do, but the bitcoin transaction data format is pretty well specified, and it turns out that this is not so hard bitcoin blockchain parser python do in practice. Bitcoin blockchain parser python more information about this here.