This commit provides a new flag, --nocheckpoints, to disable built-in
checkpoints.
Checkpoints are used for a number of things such a ensuring
the block chain being downloaded matches various known good blocks,
allowing quicker verification on old blocks since scripts don't have to be
executed, and preventing forks from old blocks, etc.
The block manager handles inventory messges to know which inventory should
be requested based on what is already known and what is already in flight.
So, this commit adds logic to ask the transaction memory pool if the
transaction is already known before requesting it and tracks pending
requests into an in-flight transaction map owned by the block manager.
It also moves the transaction processing into the block manager so the
in-flight map can be properly cleaned.
Also, the loops which only remove a single element and break or return
don't need the extra logic for iteration since they don't continue
iteration after removal.
It is not safe to remove an item from a container/list while iterating the
list without first saving the next pointer since removing the item nils
the internal list element's next pointer.
Rather than showing all errors from ProcessTransaction as a failure, check
if the error is a TxRuleError meaning the transaction was rejected as
opposed to something actually going wrong and log it accordingly.
Rather than showing all errors from ProcessBlock as a failure, check if
the error is a RuleError meaning the block was rejected as opposed to
something actually going wrong and log it accordingly.
This utility is useful to programatically identify checkpoint candidates
which a developer can then do a more in-depth analysis on to choose an
appropriate checkpoint.
This commit is a rather large one which implements transaction pool and
relay according to the protocol rules of the reference implementation.
It makes use of btcchain to ensure the transactions are valid for the
block chain and includes several stricter checks which determine if they
are "standard" or not before admitting them into the pool and relaying
them.
There are still a few TODOs around the more strict rules which determine
which transactions are willing to be mined, but the core checks which
are imperative (everything except the all of the "standard" checks really)
to operate as a good citizen on the bitcoin network are in place.
