I’m trying to understand the way Bitcoin stores block data – among other things I want to run some statistics on the block chain / transaction history and check just how anonymous Bitcoin really is.  So I went to the source to see how Bitcoin reads/writes block data to file. […]

Please test 0.3.2.5 in preparation for the 0.3.3 release!  This build is looking good and should be the one that goes into 0.3.3.  I encourage you to go ahead and upgrade now if you’re on Windows or Linux. New features: – Gavin Andresen’s HTTP authentication to secure JSON-RPC – 5x […]

Don’t use the -server or -daemon switch or run bitcoind on a machine where you use a web browser.  It opens port 8332 on 127.0.0.1, the local loopback address, and you wouldn’t think that web browsers could cross-site access it, but it is possible. We’re working on a release soon […]

Weird I guess fopen() in php dies if the response is 500? It seems like errors such as invalid address should just be normal replies just not “sent” so we can just check the reply string. I think of 500 errors as the server itself having an error. Can anyone […]

I noticed from a hint that Satoshi dropped in the JSON-RPC password thread about so-called “Multiple Invocation” support in Bitcoin’s JSON-RPC. As I run a site that polls bitcoind for payments to a large number of addresses twice a minute, I was intrigued. First of all, this isn’t JSON-RPC 2.0’s […]

Quote from: lachesis on July 23, 2010, 18:22:08 The password definitely shouldn’t be required. I strongly disagree; software should be secure by default, and running bitcoind without a password (or bitcoin -server) is definitely NOT secure. I just don’t see somebody saying “Man, Bitcoin sucks because I have to add […]

Quote from: knightmb on July 23, 2010, 19:32:58 Is there a safety reason to stop within the last 2000 blocks or can it be tweaked to stop at remaining 500 blocks for example? Not really.  I’ll change it to 1000 next time. Related posts: Faster initial block download (5x faster) […]

By making some adjustments to the database settings, I was able to make the initial block download about 5 times faster.  It downloads in about 30 minutes. The database default had it writing each block to disk synchronously, which is not necessary.  I changed the settings to let it cache […]

Occasionally bitcoind will not respond to RPC I’m calling it from php and I get this error: Warning: fopen(http://127.0.0.1:8332) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error It happens a lot locally on my windows machine and less frequently on my linux server. Anyone else […]

I’ve updated the RPC wiki page for how the password stuff will work in Bitcoin 0.3.3. One nice side effect: you can prepare for the changes now; create a bitcoin.conf file with a username and password and modify your JSON-RPC code to do the HTTP Basic Authentication thing.  Old code […]