Blockdaemon Documentation

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Connecting Bitcoin Nodes Via JSON RPC

Blockdaemon Bitcoin nodes expose an RPC interface for connecting and interactions.

Connecting via cURL

Log in to your Blockdaemon account to get into your dashboard.

Go to your node overview and copy/paste the displayed code

Command Line cURL

The following describes how to run a simple cURL command that prints the current blockchain information from the node.

The cURL command below can be used to retrieve the blockchain status of your node. Replace  <node endpoint> with your node’s endpoint plus authorization token from the Connect page.

To get this address from your node dashboard click ‘Connect’ when logged in at blockdaemon.com.

curl --user blockdaemon:blockdaemon --data 
'{"method":"getblockchaininfo","params":[],"id":1,"jsonrpc":"2.0"}' -H 
"Content-Type: application/json" -X POST <a href="https://68.183.223.134:8332/">https://<node endpoint></a>

Connecting via Python

The following describes how to run a simple Python application that prints the current best block.

Install Python libraries

Install the Python library python-bitcoinrpc. We will use this library to communicate with the RPC interface.

pip3 install python-bitcoinrpc

Copy script

Copy the following Python program into a file called bitcoin_rpc.py

import pprint from bitcoinrpc.authproxy import AuthServiceProxy, JSONRPCException

rpc_user = "blockdaemon" 
rpc_password = "blockdaemon" 
rpc_connection = AuthServiceProxy("<your node endpoint>" .format(rpc_user, rpc_password)) 
best_block_hash = rpc_connection.getbestblockhash() 
best_block = rpc_connection.getblock(best_block_hash) 
pprint.pprint(best_block)

Start the Python script

python3 bitcoin_rpc.py

Note: Bitcoin does not require an extra auth header

  • Can still use extra auth user in header (existing curl example)
  • can use basic auth
  • can use X-Auth-Token in header without auth user
  • can use bearer token in header without auth user
  • can pass auth as url param

Further Reading