This switches bitcoin's transaction/block verification logic to use a
"coin database", which contains all unredeemed transaction output scripts,
amounts and heights.
The name ultraprune comes from the fact that instead of a full transaction
index, we only (need to) keep an index with unspent outputs. For now, the
blocks themselves are kept as usual, although they are only necessary for
serving, rescanning and reorganizing.
The basic datastructures are CCoins (representing the coins of a single
transaction), and CCoinsView (representing a state of the coins database).
There are several implementations for CCoinsView. A dummy, one backed by
the coins database (coins.dat), one backed by the memory pool, and one
that adds a cache on top of it. FetchInputs, ConnectInputs, ConnectBlock,
DisconnectBlock, ... now operate on a generic CCoinsView.
The block switching logic now builds a single cached CCoinsView with
changes to be committed to the database before any changes are made.
This means no uncommitted changes are ever read from the database, and
should ease the transition to another database layer which does not
support transactions (but does support atomic writes), like LevelDB.
For the getrawtransaction() RPC call, access to a txid-to-disk index
would be preferable. As this index is not necessary or even useful
for any other part of the implementation, it is not provided. Instead,
getrawtransaction() uses the coin database to find the block height,
and then scans that block to find the requested transaction. This is
slow, but should suffice for debug purposes.
Introduce a AllocateFileRange() function in util, which wipes or
at least allocates a given range of a file. It can be overriden
by more efficient OS-dependent versions if necessary.
Block and undo files are now allocated in chunks of 16 and 1 MiB,
respectively.
Change the block storage layer again, this time with multiple files
per block, but tracked by txindex.dat database entries. The file
format is exactly the same as the earlier blk00001.dat, but with
smaller files (128 MiB for now).
The database entries track how many bytes each block file already
uses, how many blocks are in it, which range of heights is present
and which range of dates.
Special serializer/deserializer for amount values. It is optimized for
values which have few non-zero digits in decimal representation. Most
amounts currently in the txout set take only 1 or 2 bytes to
represent.
Matt pointed out some time ago that there existed a minor DOS
attack where a node in its initial block download could be wedged
by an overwrite attack in a fork created between checkpoints before
a time where BIP30 was enforced. Now that the BIP30 timestamp
is irreversibly past the check can be more aggressive and apply to
all blocks except the two historic violations.
Hard-code a special nId=max int alert, to be broadcast if the
alert key is ever compromised. It applies to all versions, never
expires, cancels all previous alerts, and has a fixed message:
URGENT: Alert key compromised, upgrade required
Variations are not allowed (ignored), so an attacker with
the private key cannot broadcast empty-message nId=max alerts.
This fixes two alert system vulnerabilities found by
Sergio Lerner; you could send peers unlimited numbers
of invalid alert message to try to either fill up their
debug.log with messages and/or keep their CPU busy
checking signatures.
Fixed by disconnecting/banning peers if they send 10 or more
bad (invalid/expired/cancelled) alerts.
If 950 of the last 1,000 blocks are nVersion=2, reject nVersion=1
(or zero, but no bitcoin release has created block.nVersion=0) blocks
-- 75 of last 100 on testnet3.
This rule is being put in place now so that we don't have to go
through another "express support" process to get what we really
want, which is for every single new block to include the block height
in the coinbase.
"Version 2" blocks are blocks that have nVersion=2 and
have the block height as the first item in their coinbase.
Block-height-in-the-coinbase is strictly enforced when
version=2 blocks are a supermajority in the block chain
(750 of the last 1,000 blocks on main net, 51 of 100 for
testnet). This does not affect old clients/miners at all,
which will continue producing nVersion=1 blocks, and
which will continue to be valid.
- If the height is in the first half, start at the genesis block and go up, rather than at the top
- Cache the last lookup and use it as a reference point if it's close to the next request, to make linear lookups always fast
- ensure warnings always start with "Warning:" and that the first
character after ":" is written uppercase
- ensure the first sentence in warnings ends with an "!"
- remove unneeded spaces from Warning-strings
- add missing Warning-string translation
- remove a "\n" and replace with untranslatable "<br><br>"
The new bytes are based on "11" to appeal to Gavin's 11 fetish.
This breaks existing testnet3 nodes as the blockchain files
are also versioned. To upgrade a node delete everything
except wallet.dat from your .bitcoin/testnet3 folder.
Modify CreateNewBlock so that instead of processing all transactions
in priority order, process the first 27K of transactions in
priority order and then process the rest in fee-per-kilobyte
order.
This is the first, minimal step towards better a better fee-handling
system for both miners and end-users; this patch should be easy
to backport to the old versions of Bitcoin, and accomplishes the
most important goal-- allow users to "buy their way in" to blocks
using transaction fees.
