New RPC methods: return an estimate of the fee (or priority) a
transaction needs to be likely to confirm in a given number of
blocks.
Mike Hearn created the first version of this method for estimating fees.
It works as follows:
For transactions that took 1 to N (I picked N=25) blocks to confirm,
keep N buckets with at most 100 entries in each recording the
fees-per-kilobyte paid by those transactions.
(separate buckets are kept for transactions that confirmed because
they are high-priority)
The buckets are filled as blocks are found, and are saved/restored
in a new fee_estiamtes.dat file in the data directory.
A few variations on Mike's initial scheme:
To estimate the fee needed for a transaction to confirm in X buckets,
all of the samples in all of the buckets are used and a median of
all of the data is used to make the estimate. For example, imagine
25 buckets each containing the full 100 entries. Those 2,500 samples
are sorted, and the estimate of the fee needed to confirm in the very
next block is the 50'th-highest-fee-entry in that sorted list; the
estimate of the fee needed to confirm in the next two blocks is the
150'th-highest-fee-entry, etc.
That algorithm has the nice property that estimates of how much fee
you need to pay to get confirmed in block N will always be greater
than or equal to the estimate for block N+1. It would clearly be wrong
to say "pay 11 uBTC and you'll get confirmed in 3 blocks, but pay
12 uBTC and it will take LONGER".
A single block will not contribute more than 10 entries to any one
bucket, so a single miner and a large block cannot overwhelm
the estimates.
Adds two new info query commands that take over information from
hodge-podge `getinfo`.
Also some new information is added:
- `getblockchaininfo`
- `chain`: (string) current chain (main, testnet3, regtest)
- `verificationprogress: (numeric) estimated verification progress
- `chainwork`
- `getnetworkinfo`
- `localaddresses`: (array) local addresses, from mapLocalHost (fixes#1734)
contrib/devtools/fix-copyright-headers.py script to be able to perform this maintenance task with ease during the rest of the year, every year. Modifications to contrib/devtools/README.md to document what fix-copyright-headers.py does.
Currently it is only possible to use `walletpassphrase` to unlock the
wallet when bitcoin is started in server mode.
Almost everything that manipulates the wallet in the RPC console
needs the wallet to be unlocked and is thus unusable without -server.
This is pretty unintuitive to me, and I'm sure it's even more confusing
to users.
Solve this with a very minimal change: by making the GUI start a
dummy RPC thread just to handle timeouts.
Split bitcoinrpc up into
- rpcserver: bitcoind RPC server
- rpcclient: bitcoin-cli RPC client
- rpcprotocol: shared common HTTP/JSON-RPC protocol code
One step towards making bitcoin-cli independent from the rest
of the code, and thus a smaller executable that doesn't have to
be linked against leveldb.
This commit only does code movement, there are no functional changes.
