"dumpblock" RPC command is a variant of
getblockbycount. I believe that a program should come with easy data inspection tools, and that was the motivation of the original getblock (then renamed to getblockbycount). One apparent objection to the merging of this patch into bitcoin was that the output would vary in the future, when lightweight clients and partial blocks are far more common. I have attempted to address this objection, with this patch.
So, I propose to include this patch
http://yyz.us/bitcoin/patch.bitcoin-dumpblockinto bitcoin 0.3.21. It adds the "dumpblock" RPC command, which takes a block-height parameter. A "_complete" boolean is inserted into the JSON output as a convenience, to indicate whether or not all transactions in the block are present (lightweight client).
Although not shown in the this, if this proposal is acceptable, I will further modify the 'dumpblock' RPC command to accept a hash parameter as an alternative to a block-height parameter. This will permit JSON-RPC users to query by either height or hash, to obtain the desired block dump.
