Transaction

j"1LAnZuoQdcKCkpDBKQMCgziGMoPC4VQUckM¡<div class="post"><div class="quoteheader"><a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=960.msg12102#msg12102">Quote from: Cdecker on September 06, 2010, 12:54:07 PM</a></div><div class="quote">I'd go for a small server that returns a unix timestamp, the client fetches it, computes the clock drift (difference in time) and all the protocol related times are based on that drift. The clocks would still drift a little (they'd do it anyway on the system clock) and we would not get perfect synchronization (impossible in distributed systems), but it would solve our current problems.<br/><br/>The code is about 5 lines and some simple math (sums) when calculating the timestamps.<br/></div><br/>Why a server when so many are already out there?<br/><br/>I'd agree that we don't want bitcoin client bloat, and definitely NO WAY the bitcoin client should be setting the system time.<br/><br/>But maybe it is worth it in the error case for the bitcoin client to put a message in the log and attempt to use a network time instead of system time.<br/><br/>As for the servers out there, the bitcoin client already has http, right?&nbsp; Well, most http servers now provide the date in their headers.&nbsp; For example, in python:<br/><div class="codeheader">Code:</div><div class="code">import os, re, urllib<br/>info = urllib.urlopen('http://www.yahoo.com/').info()<br/>regx = r'Date:\s+[A-Z][a-z]{2}, (\d{1,2}) ([A-Z][a-z]{2}) (\d{1,4}) (\d\d:\d\d:\d\d)'<br/>d, M, Y, T = re.search(regx,str(info)).groups()<br/>m = 1+"JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec".index(M)/3<br/>print '%04d.%02d.%02d-%s' % (int(Y), m, int(d), T)<br/></div><br/>(that output format happens to work with "date -us" if you did want to set some system time)<br/><br/>of course it would be better to check a couple of sites rather than relying on just yahoo to keep their http server time set properly.&nbsp; <img alt="Smiley" border="0" src="/static/img/emoticons/smiley.gif"/></div> text/html