Re: [Bitcoin-development] Suggestion for enhancements to getblock

[Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>]

> What I want to be able to do though is calculate a balance for an aribtrary
> address.  Not every address; just the particular ones that the client is
> interested in.  It's complete overkill to require the whole block chain just
> to calculate the balance of a few addresses.

But what is that for? You said it's for a lightweight client to do
that when it receives a transaction, to verify that all the
dependencies are in blocks recursively. But why?

> Not entirely.  If I ask for "the block that contains transaction with hash
> 12345678abcd..." then when I get that full block, I can verify the merkle tree
> myself.

Well, it's more efficient to just verify the merkle branch. But yes.

> I'm not entirely sure I see how a filter helps.  If I've been offline for ten
> minutes then I need all the transactions pending in the last ten minutes.  No
> amount of filtering makes that list any smaller.

Why do you need all of them? You just care about the ones sending
coins to you, surely?

> That would be fine.  My reason for suggesting using getblocks was that it
> didn't introduce a new command.

IMHO it's fine to introduce new commands. They'll just be ignored by
old clients in any event.