With discussions about block size everywhere, it's become apparent that there's actually no source of historical information about how many orphan blocks have even existed on the main Bitcoin blockchain. Any records that do exist are very incomplete, or not available for public consumption.
This is a simple distributed project which will extract orphan blocks from your disk and upload them to a central archive. Anybody who has a Bitcoin node can run this script to contribute, the older the node the more chance you will have interesting historical events. In particular, the blocks from the 2013 forking event and the integer overflow at block height 74638 would be extremely valuable to preserve.
Results will be supplied to archive.org as a public repository for future research and analysis.
Joining the hunt:
1. Download the search script
2. Run with Python (should be happy on Linux or OSX, ask if there's Windows users that with to contribute)
3. The script will download a list of already known blocks to prevent duplicate uploads
4. Wait for the scan to complete, if you cancel early the results are not impacted
Client script for searching blocks can be obtained here:
https://gist.github.com/greatorphanblock/8013b9478a8680945dd0#file-scanner-pySome rudimentary statistics are available for viewing, showing the current progress:
http://128.199.127.146/Safety: If you don't have the background to review the linked python code, wait until a trusted member of the community can vouch that this is not capable of stealing your money. The code loads only block files which have no relation to your wallet, includes no non-standard libraries, and does not have the ability execute remotely downloaded code.
Privacy: Web server logs including IP addresses are stored for 7 days for debugging, no further metadata about submitted blocks will be retained. Submitted block data (the same stuff that gets pushed around the p2p network) will be made public.
