Motives unclear

[bitcoinhodler]

Please add to the README.md something about the purpose and motivations of this project. I am pretty confused as to:

1. Who would benefit from this project and how?
2. Advantages/disadvantages of this vs bitcoind -txindex=1?

[jonasschnelli]

This is an experiment right now. It's unclear where it will lead to.

I personally see this as an architectural improvement.
It makes little sense to have all sorts of indexes in Bitcoin Core internally.

I hope with this project, that developers interested in indexing the blockchain, will fine a common ground (this project) to work on extending and adding indexes.

Background:

• [pull request idea] addressindex, spentindex, timestampindex (Bitcore patches) bitcoin/bitcoin#10370
• Allow txindex in prune mode bitcoin/bitcoin#13014
• (slow) txindex in conjunction with pruning bitcoin/bitcoin#12651

[ChristopherA]

There are a number of things that bitcoin explorers can do that bitcoind even with —txindex cannot. For instance I’d like to know if a specific address has any UTXO funds on it.

[jonasschnelli]

@ChristopherA:

There is a pull request that can do that (even for pruned peers):
bitcoin/bitcoin#12196

It scans the utxo set based on addresses (eventually deriven from keys or xpubs).
A scan may take about 30seconds.