What is the purpose of the getblock command? Why would you need to know the block height? How do I see the balances of other addresses? Why can’t we download a pre-synced copy of the blockchain without validating?

These questions are from the February monthly subscriber session and the fifth session of MOOC 11, which took place on February 23rd and March 1st 2019. If you want early-access to talks and a chance to participate in the monthly live Q&As with Andreas, become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/aantonop

RELATED:
What is a private key? – https://youtu.be/xxfUpIV9wRI
Public keys vs. addresses – https://youtu.be/8es3qQWkEiU
Re-using addresses – https://youtu.be/4A3urPFkx8g
Cryptographic primitives – https://youtu.be/RIckQ6RBt5E
Derivation paths and watch-only wallets – https://youtu.be/tPCN3nDVzZI
Key storage best practices – https://youtu.be/A5I55aOgX2o
Key management and inheritance – https://youtu.be/W3XADagE6P8
Data integrity and validation of keys – https://youtu.be/LjbREINFrZk
Randomness and vanity address generation – https://youtu.be/6u1XEucEJ_A
Malicious updates and deterministic builds – https://youtu.be/eK8bgVeUEkM
SIGHASH_NOINPUT and custodial wallets – https://youtu.be/lnb4CE3boKk
Governance and social attack immunity – https://youtu.be/PjOHatoX6Fk
Wallets, nodes, and monetary sovereignty – https://youtu.be/8Hb3tUn8s4E

Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a technologist and serial entrepreneur who has become one of the most well-known and respected figures in Bitcoin. He is the author of “Mastering Bitcoin,” “The Internet of Money” series, and “Mastering Ethereum.”

Follow on Twitter: @aantonop https://twitter.com/aantonop
Website: https://antonopoulos.com/

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MASTERING BITCOIN, 2nd Edition: https://amzn.to/2xcdsY9

Translations of MASTERING BITCOIN: https://bitcoinbook.info/translations-of-mastering-bitcoin/

THE INTERNET OF MONEY, v1: https://amzn.to/2ykmXFs
THE INTERNET OF MONEY, v2: https://amzn.to/2IIG5BJ

Translations of THE INTERNET OF MONEY:
Spanish, ‘Internet del Dinero’ (v1) – https://amzn.to/2yoaTTq
German, ‘Das Internet des Geldes’ (v1) – https://amzn.to/2LEiyqO
German, ‘Das Internet des Geldes’ (v2) – https://amzn.to/2VCzse5
French, ‘L’internet de l’argent’ (v1) – https://www.amazon.fr/Linternet-largent-Andreas-M-Antonopoulos/dp/2856083390
Russian, ‘Интернет денег’ (v1) – https://www.olbuss.ru/catalog/ekonomika-i-biznes/korporativnye-finansy-bankovskoe-delo/internet-deneg
Vietnamese, ‘Internet Của Tiền Tệ’ (v1) – https://alphabooks.vn/khi-tien-len-mang

MASTERING ETHEREUM: https://amzn.to/2xdxmlK

Music: “Unbounded” by Orfan (https://www.facebook.com/Orfan/)
Outro Graphics: Phneep (http://www.phneep.com/)
Outro Art: Rock Barcellos (http://www.rockincomics.com.br/)

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24 COMMENTS

  4. EDIT: I learned, this format is to answer your patreon's questions. That's fine. I am very confident you will address my question in some way or another before SHA-256 is compromised. Looking forward to your take on the topic.

    Hi Andreas,

    Question 1: You mentioned (maybe in antoher video) that private addresses may become compromised with computing power exceeding the security of SHA-256. If I recall correctly, you estimated 20-40 years from now. Assume, one can create new addresses using stronger encryption, new addresses would be safe, but what happens to old/unused addresses that contain a lot of bitcoin?

    Followup Question: Do you think it is feasible to declare weak addresses invalid by a hard fork with a grace period of let's say 10 years, forcing everyone to upgrade their keys within that grace period?

    Question 2: Is there such thing as an unredeemable address in the bitcoin protocol — one that bitcoin can be sunk to forever and safely so?

    Thank you very much and keep up the great work.
    Markus.

  5. You could create a snapshot of a pruning node, so that people would just download a couple of GB instead of 200+ GB, but who should to that? The Bitcoin Core team? Andreas? And how often? It's up to them whether they want to do that.

  8. Bottom line is that bitcoin core doesn t allow you to gather UTXOs on the fly…waiting for 30 minutes or 1 Hour for the node to rescan blockchain is not acceptable in some cases.

    Anyway, there are 3rd party services such as blockchain.com API that allow you to gather UTXOs of any address you pass to the API.

    However this means once again relying on 3rd parties, which is not what we want.

    So the question is: is there a way to get UTXOs of external addresses (any address) as quickly as with 3rd parties APIs?

    What if I use a different implementation of Bitcoin, such as BCOIN instead of Bitcoin Core? Would a BCOIN node allow me to get UTXOs fast and easily?

  9. Your last piece of information is not true, Andreas. Downloading a database is really fast and can be done with speed of MB/s depending on the connection speed. Validation takes a very long time. You're underestimating the amount of processing (which is not even parallelized in the Bitcoin Core software) that is done to verify blocks. Every block has to be received from a peer, then parse the binary data, validate the block, then storing it locally on the HDD then store its pointer in leveldb. This takes a very long time compared to doing it in bulk.

    A proof of this is the Neblio blockchain. They implemented something they called "QuickSync". The software embedded downloading the synchronized blockchain with https at launch (which one can choose to opt out of) instead of manually syncing. Manually syncing takes 6-12 hours on an SSD, using QuickSync (which downloads the synced databse, which is also verified by a centralized sha256 by the developers for those who don't want to wait) takes at most 10 minutes to have a fully synced node.

    Sorry, Anrdeas. You're wrong with this one.

  11. The day will come when you can know
    Longer deny that bsv is better and that it is compliant with legal systems and that it is the orginal bitcoin with the orginal founder behind it.

  12. If someone was to offer the block chain on ebay for instance. Is there a risk of it being corrupt or hacked?
    I would imagine not as the core wallet would correct any errors.

    For some people with low bandwidth this could be an option.

  18. Kent Lewis says Bitcoin is actually owned by the central banks – If you follow the shell company trail back far enough – also the platforms such as COinbase are owned by the central bank…can someone provide insight to Kent Lewis information?

  21. I disagree with the last statement as a wallet provider I have to keep separate backup copies of the blockchains because if they become corrupted restoring them from my back is faster than downloading from scratch. Keep in mind I have 1 GB up and down access and the process of downloading the chain is slower than me sending the backup copy from Chile to my remote server farm in the USA.

    It is my opinion that there is something wrong with the bitcoin BitTorrent code as internal tests with many nodes with the blockchain connected to 1 node without is several orders of magnitude slower to download the blockchain than just copying the blockchain. This may be due to the fact that bitcoin nodes are not dedicated to the torrent activity.

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