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For Geth, in another terminal, attach to the Geth console, such as geth attach. This will allow you to keep your syncing node running, without restarting, and you will not see the noisy logs as you would if you simply ran "geth console" without other parameters.
In the console, run eth.syncing
> eth.syncing
{
currentBlock: 745600,
...
41
Do following steps to check the sync state:
1.) open a new geth instance and type in geth attach
2.) now type in eth.syncing
This shows you the "currentBlock" and the "highestBlock".
39
[EDIT] this answer was edited to add more information about non monetary valuable benefits provided by a full node. This edit was triggered by one of @fraxture comment on this answer.
TL;DR
No, you won't earn "old world" money or Ether (ETH).
However you would have a lot of other benefits from helping the Ethereum project grow and increasing your ...
37
An 'Ethereum client' is just a term. It refers to any node able to parse and verify the blockchain, its smart contracts and everything related. It also allows you/provides interfaces to create transactions and mine blocks which is the key for any blockchain interaction.
Official reference implementations (CLI)
There are currently three reference ...
30
Disclaimer: I run ethernodes.org
There is a node explorer available at ethernodes.org which tries to estimate the number of nodes on the Ethereum network.
The estimation is based on an active crawling process that recursively connects to a node and asks for its known peers. As this approach only reaches nodes that are accessible from the outside a second, ...
26
A node is a device/program that communicates with the Ethereum network. Nodes are also known as clients. Software that can act as an Ethereum node include Parity and Go-ethereum (geth). This software mostly, if not always, also provides wallet functionality (software that allows users to perform transactions on the blockchain). Some node software also allows ...
24
It sounds like geth is not yet synced up.
Please type this into your geth console:
eth.getBlock("latest").number
As of this post, you should get 894332 or higher.
I get the correct output on my geth console.
> web3.fromWei(web3.eth.getBalance('0x7cacf18f931259c30a7194fa96ab3a44c38b3535'),'ether').toString(10)
"0.01"
23
Ethereum nodes (regardless of mining) need to have an accurate time, otherwise they will not be able to connect to peers and to the network (https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/wiki/Connecting-to-the-network).
Small differences in time are tolerated by nodes, but as one node's time gets further away from Coordinated UTC Time (per NTP), its number of ...
22
Use admin.peers to get a list of the currently connected peers:
> admin.peers
[{
caps: ["eth/61", "eth/62", "eth/63"],
id: "3f8f61999252251808972871bc810505d5b33f7de761c98810584279dce9ecabb0b7da0836978e6074f48e2b787048739c9dc1f734403c8adafc0716d16f4dcd",
name: "Geth/v1.3.5-34b622a2/linux/go1.6",
network: {
localAddress: "192.168.0....
22
http://localhost:8545 is the RPC port of your locally running Ethereum node software.
When running geth, the Go implementation of the Ethereum node software, the command line parameters to create and configure this RPC service follows:
user@Kumquat:~$ geth --help | grep rpc
--rpc Enable the HTTP-RPC server
--rpcaddr "127.0.0.1" ...
21
It's a language thing about the relationship. It's like "people" and "friends". It's not that friends aren't also people. We might say that people are friends because they have a certain relationship to us.
Ethereum nodes are initially alone, and then they seek out other nodes to talk to. When nodes agree to talk, they become peers to each other.
"Peers" ...
18
If you are using Geth:
geth attach http://host
then enter:
web3.eth.blockNumber
It will give you the block number as integer, here's the function documentation. If you are looking for the block hash instead you can use:
web3.eth.getBlock(BLOCK_NUMBER).hash
so for the current block (atm) it will be:
web3.eth.getBlock(887893).hash
and for the latest ...
18
Infura is the most prominent public Ethereum nodes. They run mainnet and many of the testnets. They also run IPFS servers. http://infura.io.
18
If you are using the new web3.js 1.0.0-beta, then try this (all the syntax has changed, sigh). Tested with testrpc -d.
> var Web3 = require('web3');
> var web3 = new Web3('http://localhost:8545');
> web3.version;
'1.0.0-beta.11'
> web3.eth.getAccounts().then(console.log);
Promise { ... }
> [ '0x90F8bf6A479f320ead074411a4B0e7944Ea8c9C1',
'...
15
There are a couple of "reference implementations" that the Ethereum foundation is supporting.
Ethereum C++ (known as Eth or "TurboEthereum")
Go Ethereum (known for the command line client Geth)
EthereumJ
Pyethereum
There are a couple of reasons for doing this.
Finding consensus problems.
Bitcoin was created in an isolated environment, because of this ...
14
Paste this line of code into the geth console to get a more concise version:
admin.peers.forEach(function(value){console.log(value.network.remoteAddress+"\t"+value.name)})
This will display something similar to this:
200.54.168.131:51340 Geth/v1.4.18-stable/linux/go1.6.2
85.145.173.31:42486 Geth/v1.5.4-stable/linux/go1.7.3
99.103.160.189:51995 ...
14
I think that Bitcoin wiki has a good article: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Full_node its not for ethereum but the concept is pretty much the same.
Full node is somebody connected to p2p network that verifies the blocks. I believe that all ethereum clients at this point are full nodes.
Lightweight nodes do not check or download the whole block-chain. See ...
13
geth saves its internal states for the main network in the chaindata directory. You can find it in the directory:
~/.ethereum on linux
~/Library/Ethereum on OS X
~/AppData/Roaming/Ethereum
It uses the LevelDB database. You can save this directory only if geth is stopped to prevent corruptions. The data is portable on Linux, Windows and MacOS X (i have ...
13
Currently there is indeed no monetary incentive to run a full node. It's done by enthusiasts that just do it for the fun of it, or by projects who are building on top of Ethereum and need access to network data (also wallets run it at the moment because light clients aren't done yet, they will certainly switch away s soon as they can).
The inherent problem ...
12
Q: I know that when a new geth instance runs it connects to the bootstrap nodes. What I want to know that do other nodes download blockchain from the bootstrap nodes or nor?
A: No. Regular nodes do not download the blockchain from bootnodes. The only role for the bootnodes is to allow regular nodes to connect to and get the connection information on other ...
11
I think you should edit the question to ask, "How do I know when geth is done syncing?"
The question you asked was vague, but I believe this is the answer you were after:
Geth will continue running forever. Once it is "done", it will just sit there and wait for the next block. The "numbers" you refer to are block numbers, and they shall increment for all ...
11
So we actually very, very rarely completely exploded. During big ICOs for instance we were seeing 200k transactions being sent via the MEW node in a single hour, which is about 55 TX/sec. Each transaction consists of:
Loading balance
Loading token balances
Getting network gas price (we no longer do this)
Estimating gas (each time the user changes a field)
...
11
Install https://metamask.io/ and
Navigate to https://remix.ethereum.org/
Click on settings -> choose your compiler (e.g. 0.4.19+commit.c4cbbb05). Note that optimization is unchecked.
Login to metmask and choose your network (i would suggest first testing using ropsten test network and using the buy button to get ETH from a free faucet)
Go back to the compile ...
10
You may use Infura as a "read only / signed transactions only" node.
The use of the API is free: https://infura.io
Your may recommend your users to use Metamask Browser extension to be able to sign transactions in your App.
10
Assuming you are using a Linux flavoured OS, you can check the sync status as well (run this as the user under which geth is running):
$ geth --exec eth.syncing.currentBlock attach
3991639
If it's not syncing, it will only display 'false'.
Or, if you want to get a little more fancy and see how many blocks / second are syncing, here is an idea:
A=$(geth --...
9
If you are deploying an app at scale, you probably don't want a mere node. You want a full and performant web API. There are several available: I've personally used etherscan.io and been reasonably happy with it.
If it's just a testing project, spinning up your own node isn't too bad. But if you're using any of the actual node functionality, such as ...
9
Yes, there are 3 official clients in Golang, C++ and Python. And there are 4 unofficial clients in Java, Haskell, JavaScript and most recently Rust.
To answer your question, the full node client implementation in JavaScript is the node-blockchain-server of the ethereumjs project.
The node-blockchain-server aims to provide a full Ethereum node ...
9
Copying the .ethereum/chaindata folder is a good idea. I've done that on my Rpi2 and everything worked fine. Also, if it's not fully synced on the original machine, the RPi2 will just start syncing from the last block in the copied chaindata folder, thus saving a lot of time.
Note that I never ran geth import blockchain_db. There was no need. Copying the ...
9
When a node is validating a block, transactions are executed sequentially, in the order specified by the block; this is necessary, since a block might contain multiple transactions that call the same contract, and the contract's execution might depend on state modified by previous callers.
When a miner is mining a block, it chooses which transactions to ...
9
You can see the connected peers by typing admin.peers in the Geth console. The maximum number of peers is set using the -maxpeers n flag in Geth.
There is a discovery process based on Kademlia for finding nodes, then a handshaking process by which they determine which devp2p protocols they support (Eth, Bzz, Shh). The P2P layer monitors each node's quality ...
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