This is a simplified re-do of closed pull #3088.
This patch eliminates the privacy and reliability problematic use
of centralized web services for discovering the node's addresses
for advertisement.
The Bitcoin protocol already allows your peers to tell you what
IP they think you have, but this data isn't trustworthy since
they could lie. So the challenge is using it without creating a
DOS vector.
To accomplish this we adopt an approach similar to the one used
by P2Pool: If we're announcing and don't have a better address
discovered (e.g. via UPNP) or configured we just announce to
each peer the address that peer told us. Since peers could
already replace, forge, or drop our address messages this cannot
create a new vulnerability... but if even one of our peers is
giving us a good address we'll eventually make a useful
advertisement.
We also may randomly use the peer-provided address for the
daily rebroadcast even if we otherwise have a seemingly routable
address, just in case we've been misconfigured (e.g. by UPNP).
To avoid privacy problems, we only do these things if discovery
is enabled.
We're using GetRandomBytes in several contexts where it's either
unwieldy to return an error, or an error would mean a fatal exception
anyhow.
@gmaxwell checked OpenSSL a while ago and discovered that it never
actually fails, but it can't hurt to be a bit paranoid here.
This is less surprising.
Avoids the overload-the-CPU default of using N threads for script
verification as well as N threads for generation where N is number of cores.
50b43fd Be a bit more verbose during -loadblock if we already have blocks (Matt Corallo)
8375e22 Fix -loadblock after shutdown during IBD (Matt Corallo)
4ead850 Fix for crash during block download (Matt Corallo)
tl;dr: This solves boost visibility problems for default/release build configs
on non-Linux platforms.
When Bitcoin builds against boost's header-only classes, it ends up with
objects containing symbols that the upstream boost libs also have. Since
Bitcoin builds by default with hidden symbol visibility, it can end up trying
to link against a copy of the same symbols with default visibility.
This is not a problem on Linux because 3rd party static libs are un-exported
by default (--exclude-libs,ALL), but that is not available for MinGW and OSX.
Those platforms (and maybe others?) end up confused about which version to use.
The OSX linker spews hundreds of: "ld: warning: direct access in <foo> to
global weak symbol guard variable for <bar> means the weak symbol cannot be
overridden at runtime. This was likely caused by different translation units
being compiled with different visibility settings."
MinGW's linker complains similarly.
Since the default symbol visibility for Bitcoin is hidden and releases are
built that way as well, build Boost with hidden visibility. Linux builds Boost
this way also, but only for the sake of continuity.
This means that the linker confusion logic is reversed, so the problem will
will now be encountered if Bitcoin is built with --disable-reduce-exports, but
that's better than the current situation.
Start the RPC server before doing all the (expensive) startup
initialisations like loading the block index. Until the node is ready,
return all calls immediately with a new error signalling "in warmup"
with an appropriate status message (similar to the init message).
This is useful for RPC clients to know that the server is there (e. g.,
they don't have to start it) but not yet available. It is used in
Namecoin and Huntercoin already for some time, and there exists a UI
hooked onto the RPC interface that actively uses this to its advantage.
Wladimir J. van der Laan