eklitzke / satoshis-coins Goto Github PK

This is a utility that looks at the early hash rate of the Bitcoin network and exports data as JSON.

This code is written for Python 3.5+. You'll also need a full Bitcoin Core node. To install the runtime dependencies, run pip install -r requirements.txt (possibly after creating a virtualenv). Afterwards you can run analyze.py with a URL that points to your Bitcoin node:

# Substitute your own rpc user/password when running this command.
$ python analyze.py http://rpcuser:[email protected]:8332

The code is pretty straightforward: it just fetches blocks starting from the genesis block until enough data has been collected. Two things are worth noting:

• The timestamps used are the start time for each difficulty period. Therefore the first data point has an indicated time of Jan 3, 2009, even that difficulty period ran up to Jan 27, 2009.
• For simplicity, I estimate the network hash rate using the delta from the first two blocks in two consecutive difficulty periods. This is off-by-one from how difficulty is computed in the reference code, which is restricted to comparing the first block in the period to the last block in the same period (for consensus reasons). This doesn't affect the data analysis or conclusions in any way.