Hacker's Cookbook

Making Bitcoin Core Accessible from Another Computer on the LAN

Set the bitcoin.conf file as the following

rpcbind=127.0.0.1
rpcbind=192.168.1.2
rpcallowip=192.168.1.2
rpcallowip=192.168.1.3
debug=http
server=1
rest=1
txindex=1
rpcworkqueue=100

where 192.168.1.2 is the IP address of the computer where Bitcoin Core is running, and 192.168.1.3 is the IP address of the computer where you want to query Bitcoin Core. Alternatively you can use 192.168.1.1/24 to allow every computer in the subnet to query Bitcoin Core, at the cost of less restricted access.

To check if the node is accessible, on the host machine you can run the following to check if Bitcoin Core is correctly listening on the given port:

> netstat -aonq | findstr 8332
TCP    127.0.0.1:8332       0.0.0.0:0      LISTENING       64324
TCP    192.168.1.2:8332     0.0.0.0:0      LISTENING       64324

if the output of this command is at the following, it indicates that Bitcoin Core is listening on localhost and the port is not reachable from any other computer. In this case, make sure the above configuration is set correctly, the rpcbind parameter specifically.

> netstat -aonq | findstr 8332
TCP    127.0.0.1:8332       0.0.0.0:0      LISTENING       2416
TCP    [::1]:8332           [::]:0         LISTENING       2416

On the client machine you can run the following to check if the port is open and accessible:

> nc -z 192.168.1.2 8332
Connection to 192.168.1.2 port 8332 (tcp/*) succeeded!

Read more about networking or related security details.

Some blocks for debugging

• There are many transactions where they create many outputs with 0 value. For instance, the transaction with id ceb1a7fb57ef8b75ac59b56dd859d5cb3ab5c31168aa55eb3819cd5ddbd3d806 belonging to the block with height 123573, contains 279 outputs with value 0.

• Examples of some bad/strange transactions:

  • 71036 (search for txes in this block)
  • 268449
  • 565912
  • 706953
  • 774532
  • 710061 (some execution path related to this are currently not implemented)