Get raw blocks

Hi,

Reading through the issues this is not the only request but here it is anyway.

I’m currently putting up a Bitcoin backend plugin for C-lightning [1] which would hit an esplora instance’s API. C-lightning needs sendrawtransaction, gettxout, getblock, estimatesmartfee and some fields of getblockchainfo. Almost everything was provided by esplora, but not raw blocks (verbosity 0 in getblock). It would be great to be able to get them, say, the same way we access the raw transactions (“GET /tx/:txid/hex” ==> “GET /block/:blockhash/hex”).

Anyway, thanks for open sourcing such a great API for working with Bitcoin !

[1] To potentially replace bitcoind

[shesek]

Well, actually, after giving this some more thought… the alternative outlined at the end of (1) - treating them as byte blobs and manually stitching them together - isn’t really that complicated or error prone, its just <raw header><varint tx count><raw txs>.

I went ahead and implemented this in https://github.com/Blockstream/electrs/commit/de1ffb9cd7f434e7b17de0b8858cc82b48a294b3, will become available with the next deployment.

[darosior]

@lvaccaro Given some error messages from the Esplora API I assumed it relied on the bitcoind API for some of its calls so a getblock <blockhash> 1 seems possible