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I am playing around with a private blockchain, and I realize that I do not know how to get the "genesis block" info. The eth.getBlock(0) does not show the Genesis information, for example, pre-fund by "alloc".

So, how can I retrieve the information of the Genesis block?

My Genesis file looks like:

  "gasLimit": "0x30000000",
  "difficulty": "0x1",
  "mixHash": "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "coinbase": "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "alloc": {
    "e9722f81388f8f99771cad2770aba1f4b9e2d86c": {
      "balance": "1000000000000000000000000"
    }
  },

What I want to know is how can I get the "alloc" information through the web3 or JSON-RPC API.

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  • Do you mean the genesis block of the mainnet or of your private chain?
    – TC8
    Commented Jan 31, 2018 at 7:15
  • My private chain. I have the Genesis file. What makes me confused is I think the information should have been written into the block, but I do not know how to get the information (for example, through web3).
    – alpha
    Commented Jan 31, 2018 at 7:48

1 Answer 1

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for the public networks, those values are defined in a config file. For geth you can find those values in this file (for mainnet, and testnets)

https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/blob/master/params/config.go#L33

regarding a private network, well you need a genesis file to initialize your network, so you should have it somewhere. However, it is possible to reverse engineer most values. Give a look at the rpc methods:

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/JSON-RPC

for example, from your javascript console ($ geth attach "http://localhost:8545") calling

> net.version

will return you the networkId

> eth.getBlock('latest')

will return you the latest block from which you can find the gasLimit, etc

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  • How to get the "alloc" information? How to get the address and balance in "alloc"?
    – alpha
    Commented Jan 31, 2018 at 7:55
  • 1
    I dont think you can using RPC methods. Browsing https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/blob/master/core/genesis.go it looks that the alloc addresses and balances are saved in geth DB. What makes sense since it is required to have a genesis file to init a node. Therefore all node will know about the alloc info. The info being saved in the node DB it is for sure possible to recover them. Nevertheless I dont have an answer on how to do it
    – salanfe
    Commented Jan 31, 2018 at 8:15

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