Rebased by @laanwj:
- update for RPC methods added since 84d13ee: setmocktime,
invalidateblock, reconsiderblock. Only the first, setmocktime, required a change,
the other two are thread safe.
Speed up generating blocks in regression test mode, by moving
block-creating and nonce-finding directly into the setgenerate
RPC call (instead of starting up a mining thread and waiting for
it to find a block).
This makes the forknotify RPC test three times quicker, for
example (10 seconds runtime instead of 30 seconds, assuming
the initial blockchain cache is already built).
Split up util.cpp/h into:
- string utilities (hex, base32, base64): no internal dependencies, no dependency on boost (apart from foreach)
- money utilities (parsesmoney, formatmoney)
- time utilities (gettime*, sleep, format date):
- and the rest (logging, argument parsing, config file parsing)
The latter is basically the environment and OS handling,
and is stripped of all utility functions, so we may want to
rename it to something else than util.cpp/h for clarity (Matt suggested
osinterface).
Breaks dependency of sha256.cpp on all the things pulled in by util.
This commit removes all the unnecessary dependencies (key, core,
netbase, sync, ...) from bitcoin-cli.
To do this it shards the chain parameters into BaseParams, which
contains just the RPC port and data directory (as used by utils and
bitcoin-cli) and Params, with the rest.
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.
Wladimir J. van der Laan