Is there a lightweight blockchain parser library/server?

Question

I'm using bitcoin-qt and have a local copy of the blockchain, in which I'm running some analysis with the JSON-RPC API using mostly getblock and getrawtransaction. I have no need writing or sending transactions in this use case. It's overkill to run a full node just to read the blockchain, and it hurts my analysis performance, too.

Is there a (preferrably tested) library to parse the blockchain and return objects, JSON or not? Language doesn't matter much. If not, is there a node implementation that allow turning off network and wallet features?

Answer 1

There are a couple available:

https://github.com/znort987/blockparser Which is c++ based and has some basic analysis functions already written.

http://codesuppository.blogspot.com/2014/01/how-to-parse-bitcoin-blockchain.html describes the basics of parsing the block chain and links to code written by the author of the post.

It looks like most projects don't parse it directly and use the RPC interface of the main bitcoin client.

Answer 2

A good solution would be to use a trusted third-party that has already parsed the entire block chain for you. For example, the Blockchain.info API is quite well suited for your purpose.

Specifically what you want is the Block Explorer API which returns JSON objects.

Answer 3

https://github.com/alecalve/python-bitcoin-blockchain-parser just parses the blkXXXXX.dat directly for you into Python, no servers needed. Likely much slower than the C++ option from https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/22621/21282 , but good at least for quick prototyping since in Python.