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Do they have a client installed on their servers that pulls the info out of block headers? How does it do it? What's the command?
How does blockchaininfo find out the difficulty?
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Blockchain.info definitely has a client installed on their servers, that's where they get all the block data from. I heard they're using a fork of BitcoinJ.
In the Bitcoin-qt daemon, you can get the difficulty of the latest block with the getdifficulty command, and you can get complete information about every block, including the difficulty, with getblock.
@KinnardHockenhull Open up spotlight and type in "terminal" for the command line. If your bitcoind instance has JSON-RPC enabled through config you can use CURL to access the data – goodguys_activate – 2013-03-03T23:22:18.530
Or just open the regular QT client and click help : Debug Window : Console. You can use most of the commands right there if youre running 7.x – goodguys_activate – 2013-03-03T23:23:56.080
How would I do it without a UI, say, if I installed bitcoind on my server? – Kinnard Hockenhull – 2012-12-07T07:08:40.990
If you can access it with a CLI, you can go to the daemon directory and run bitcoind.exe with the required command as a parameter. Other than that there's something called JSON-RPC but I don't really know what that is. – Meni Rosenfeld – 2012-12-07T07:54:27.080
Drats, I have a Mac . . . – Kinnard Hockenhull – 2012-12-14T02:44:52.027
@KinnardHockenhull: Are you talking about a computer you have locally? I don't know how Macs work, but doesn't it have a command prompt? – Meni Rosenfeld – 2012-12-14T04:37:50.967