The efficient version of CCoinsViewCache::GetCoins only works for known-to-exist
cache entries, requiring a separate HaveCoins call beforehand. This is
inefficient as both perform a hashtable lookup.
Replace the non-mutable GetCoins with AccessCoins, which returns a potentially-NULL
pointer. This also decreases the overloading of GetCoins.
Also replace some copying (inefficient) GetCoins calls with equivalent AccessCoins,
decreasing the copying.
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.
Allows network wallets and other clients to see transactions that respend
a prevout already spent in an unconfirmed transaction in this node's mempool.
Knowledge of an attempted double-spend is of interest to recipients of the
first spend. In some cases, it will allow these recipients to withhold
goods or services upon being alerted of a double-spend that deprives them
of payment.
As before, respends are not added to the mempool.
Anti-Denial-of-Service-Attack provisions:
- Use a bloom filter to relay only one respend per mempool prevout
- Rate-limit respend relays to a default of 100 thousand bytes/minute
- Define tx2.IsEquivalentTo(tx1): equality when scriptSigs are not considered
- Do not relay these equivalent transactions
Remove an unused variable declaration in txmempool.cpp.
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.
Philip Kaufmann