 Get Bitcoin transaction id from position in dat file

ID: get-bitcoin-transaction-id-from-position-in-dat-file

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Get Bitcoin transaction id from position in dat file by

Ciro Santilli 37  Updated 2025-05-26  +Created 1970-01-01

Suppose we specify:

a .dat file
the offset in bytes within that file

The question then is, which transaction is encoded at that position of the file?

This would allow us to index inscriptions in the .dat files directly with fast C tools, and then retrive the transaction ID to get cleaner data and metadata.

It should be possible if we managed to take the information from bitcoindev.network/understanding-the-data/ and dump into an indexed SQLite database.

I tried to start things off with LevelDBDumper:

LevelDBDumper -d ~/snap/bitcoin-core/common/.bitcoin/indexes/txindex -f btc.csv -q -o . -t csv

but that consumed all 64 GB of RAM on P51... github.com/mdawsonuk/LevelDBDumper/issues/15

But OK, nevermind that repo, it can be done easily with the LevelDB API of any language: bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/121888/what-is-the-data-format-layout-for-txindex-leveldb-values. Just the data seems wrong and we don't know why.

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