This is a small program to extract Bitcoin block headers from a bitcoin node running locally (ip: 127.0.0.1 port 8333) and compute a history and real time estimate of Bitcoin difficulty.
The estimation is documented here: https://medium.com/@tamas.blummer/estimating-next-bitcoin-mining-difficulty-3ea85e7a8adb
The output on stdout is a csv file with following field:
- block height
- block time point (unix timestamp)
- network difficulty - this changes only at every 2016th block
- next difficulty estimate - this changes with every block and converges at low volatility to network difficulty
Need:
- rust 1.23 or higher, get it fom https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/
Build:
- cargo build --release
Run:
target/release/bitcoin-diffest > difftest.txt
It should take ca 10 minutes if built as above for release running on an Intel i7 processor, at block height of 508829.
I checked in a run result for those curious how it looks like before running it with real time data.
Above example result visualized for last blocks:
