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What is the most simple and reliable way to determine basic Bitcoin network attributes? By this I mean (estimated) total network hashing rate, difficulty, number of blocks solved, etc.
I know there are a ton of websites that can give me this. But I'm wondering if there is some easy and formalized way to read this data from somewhere that is not subject to suddenly change their layout (like a website). Also I'm not sure if a website would like me to use a program to fetch data from it.
My goal is simply to write a small local socket based program that can do some statistics and extrapolation based on current (and previous, stored locally) data.
you can use the "getinfo" command in bitcoind or bitcoin-qt to determine blocks and difficulty. not sure how to determine hashing rate without a third party. see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/API_reference_(JSON-RPC)
– hsmiths – 2013-12-14T18:59:56.107Hash rates are estimated from how often blocks are solved compared to network difficulty. – Jems – 2013-12-14T23:47:22.710