How to get total transactions on the network with RPC

Question

I have seen no concrete answer to this question anywhere. I assume it is possible to get the total number of successful transactions on the bitcoin network using bitcoin-cli command because most explorers provide this information. How can i get this information from a fully synced node?

Answer 1

I'm reasonably sure this is not exposed by the RPC API.

You could parse debug.log and look for lines like:

2019-08-20T12:17:58Z UpdateTip: new best=0000000000000000000e6c402b311740e21f79a42ed84ecf69a3ae4fe88ce882 height=590956 version=0x20000000 log2_work=90.9855 tx=446914655 date='2019-08-20T12:17:55Z' progress=1.000000 cache=277.1MiB(321228txo)

Where tx=num gives the total transaction count. I reckon that most explorers maintain a separate database of the transactions, and simply run a query against that instead of pulling data like this from a node or log.

Answer 2

Another possibility is to use the getblockstats command to get the number of transactions (not including the coinbase transaction) for a specific block (by height/hash). E.g.

$ getblockstats 500000 '["txs"]'

{
  "txs": 2701
}

Then, iterate through all of the blocks to get the total for all blocks.