Is it possible to request an individual block from the bitcoin network, using the block height as parameter? Or would one have to start a node and wait until all blocks up to the desired height have been retrieved?
I'd like to be able to retrieve the actual, raw, serialized data, but e.g. blockchain.info, even when saying format=raw
doesn't give you the raw block data.
N.B. If I understand bitcoin correctly though, I fear that if I don't build up a node by myself, starting from block 0, I can never be sure what I'm getting is true data from the bitcoin blockchain, no matter if I get it from blockchain.info (which could be compromised) or from a p2p peer, which is just one (potentially malicious) peer.