What does getinfo output mean?

Question

I am trying to get my foot in the door wrt to bitcoind. I pulled the github version here. As suggested here, I am starting the daemon like so

bitcoind -daemon

and I am monitoring it like so

bitcoind getinfo

And I get the following output

{
    "version" : 89900,
    "protocolversion" : 70002,
    "walletversion" : 60000,
    "balance" : 0.00000000,
    "blocks" : 269516,
    "timeoffset" : -2,
    "connections" : 8,
    "proxy" : "",
    "difficulty" : 510929738.01615179,
    "testnet" : false,
    "keypoololdest" : 1386220819,
    "keypoolsize" : 101,
    "paytxfee" : 0.00000000,
    "errors" : "This is a pre-release test build - use at your own risk - do not use for mining or merchant applications"
}

Obviously some are self explanatory, but could someone go through and explain what all of this output means?

Answer 1

An explanation of the meaning of the fields given by 'getinfo' :

version - The version number of this bitcoin-qt or bitcoind program itself. Both of are equivalent. -qt is simply the graphical user interface version

protocolversion: The version of the bitcoin network protocol supported by this client (user agent software).

walletversion: The version of the wallet.dat file. Wallet.dat contains bitcoin addresses and public & private key pairs for these addresses. There is additional data on the wallet. Care must be taken to not restore from an old wallet backup. New addresses generated in the wallet since the old backup was made will not exist in the old backup! Source: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet

balance: The total number of bitcoins held in the wallet.dat file.

blocks: The total number of blocks which constitute the shared block chain.

timeoffset: Seconds of difference between this node's "wall clock time" and the median reported by our network peers.

connections: the number of peers on the bitcoin P2P network that this node is connected to.

proxy: If using a proxy to connect to the network, listed here, otherwise blank.

difficulty: the current mining difficulty factor. Difficulty is increased as more miners and more hash compute power compete to be the next one to have a block of transactions added to the blockchain.

testnet: Boolean value (true OR false). There is a parallel bitcoin network, the testnet, where trials and experiments may be carried out without impacting the official, live bitcoin P2P network

keypoololdest: timestamp (UNIX epoch) of the oldest key in the keypool

keypoolsize: A number of addresses are kept in reserve by the client. This is the size of that reserve.

paytxfee: Specifies what fee the client is willing to pay to expedite transactions. Miners may choose to ignore transactions that do not pay a fee, and these fee-less transactions will have low priority on queue of pending transaction and may linger there for hours.

errors: This field may inform of different status conditions. Full list of error codes in source file bitcoinrpc.h (https://dev.visucore.com/bitcoin/doxygen/bitcoinrpc_8h_source.html) (Examples: "Bitcoin not connected", "database error", "Keypool ran out"...)

Answer 2

This is in addition to Dan K's answer. Since he wrote it there is a new field:

relayfee: The relay fee is also the transaction fee, but it refers to a different use than what you may know. A transaction fee is included with a transaction to encourage and reward miners for including the transaction in the blockchain. It refers to the minimum fee amount that other clients on the peer-to-peer network require in order to forward transactions to other peers. This fee is in place in order to prevent the broadcast and propogation of DDoS-like spam transactions. The relay fee is coded in a different place than the transaction fee in Bitcoin. In the past, it has also been set at a different amount than the transaction fee. For a good portion of recent Bitcoin history, the minimum transaction fee used by the Bitcoin client and by most miners was 0.0005 BTC per kB, but the minimum relay fee was coded at 0.0001 BTC. The transaction fee was then lowered, bringing them in sync.