Credits:
--------

    Written by [email protected]
    If you find this useful: 1ZnortsoStC1zSTXbW6CUtkvqew8czMMG

What:
-----

    A fast, quick and dirty bitcoin blockchain parser.

Why:
----

    . Few dependencies: openssl-dev, boost

    . Understand how the data structure underlying bitcoin works.

    . Very quickly extract information from the entire blockchain.

Build it:
---------

    . Turn your x86-64 Ubuntu box on

    . Make sure you have an up to date satoshi client blockchain in ~/.bitcoin

    . Run this:

        sudo apt-get install libssl-dev build-essential g++-4.4 libboost-all-dev libsparsehash-dev git-core perl
        git clone git://github.com/znort987/blockparser.git
        cd blockparser
        make

Try it:
-------

    . Compute simple blockchain stats, full chain parse (< 1 second)

        ./parser simpleStats

    . Extract all transactions for popular address 1dice6wBxymYi3t94heUAG6MpG5eceLG1 (20 seconds)

        ./parser transactions 06f1b66fa14429389cbffa656966993eab656f37

    . Compute the closure of an address, list of addresses that provably belong to the same person (20 seconds):

        ./parser closure 06f1b66fa14429389cbffa656966993eab656f37

    . Compute and print the balance for all keys ever used in a TX since the beginning of time (30 seconds):

        ./parser allBalances >allBalances.txt

Caveats:
--------

    . You need an x86-84 ubuntu box and a recent version of GCC(>=4.4), recent versions of boost
      and openssl-dev. The whole thing is very unlikely to work or even compile on anything else.

    . It needs quite a bit of RAM to work. Never exactly measured how much, but the hash maps will
      grow quite fat. I might switch them to something different that spills over to disk at some
      point. For now: it works fine with 8 Gigs.

    . The code isnt particularly clean or well architected. It was just a quick way for me to learn
      about bitcoin. There isnt much in the way of comments.

    . OTOH, it is fairly simple, short, and efficient. If you want to understand how the blockchain
      data structure works, the code in parser.cpp is a fairly good way to start.

Hacking the code:
-----------------

    . parser.cpp contains a generic parser that mmaps the blockchain, parses it and calls "user-defined"
      callbacks as it hits interesting bits of information.

    . util.cpp contains a grab-bag of useful bitcoin related routines. Interesting examples include:

        showScript
        solveOutputScript
        decompressPublicKey

    . cb/closure.cpp        :   code to compute the transitive closure of an address.
    . cb/allBalances.cpp    :   code to all balance of all addresses.
    . cb/simpleStats.cpp    :   code to compute simple stats.
    . cb/transactions.cpp   :   code to extract all transactions pertaining to an address.

    . You can add your own custom callback. You can use the existing callbacks in
      directory ./cb/ to build your own:

            cp cb/allBalances.cpp cb/myExtractor.cpp
            Add to Makefile
            Hack away
            Recompile

    . The code makes heavy use of the google dense hash maps. You can switch it to use sparse hash
      maps (see util.h, search for: DENSE, undef it). Sparse hash maps are slower but save quite a
      bit of RAM.

License:
--------

    Entire codebase is in the public domain.