Add `mine_block` RPC endpoint

[zone117x]

Add an authenticated/development/localhost RPC endpoint to force a block mine. See evm_mine eth RPC for inspiration.

Development and testing environments needs more control of blockchain progression -- examples:

• A public regtest explorer with a faucet, contract deploy, and contract call playground endpoints; I want this environment to perform regular mining at something like 0.5-10 minute intervals, but have submitted transactions trigger an immediate mine.
• An integration testing environment that needs fine-grained control over tx minting.

[jcnelson]

Add an authenticated/development/localhost RPC endpoint to force a block mine. See evm_mine eth RPC for inspiration.

Just so you know, going forward, Stacks nodes won't directly mine blocks. Instead, there will be a separate miner program that generates and broadcasts the requisite Bitcoin transactions, and propagates the Stacks block. The Stacks node will implement a get_block_template-like API endpoint that generates and returns a block built from unconfirmed transactions, as well as some metadata like the block's hash and (possibly) a template block-commit Bitcoin transaction for the miner to sign.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[zone117x]

The Clarity SDK still needs this feature from the mocknet node, e.g. to complete this feature https://github.com/blockstack/clarity-js-sdk/pull/83/files

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[zone117x]

Not sure if this is stale now that @lgalabru is maintainer of the project used for Stacks+Clarity testing (Clarinet). I used write a lot of Ethereum smart contract tests that required this feature -- @lgalabru is this still needed?

[jcnelson]

I think the consensus around this is that mining is a separate process from the node. Please reopen if we want to revisit this.