How do I iterate through the entire Blockchain using RPC?
Your plan is correct (use getrawtransaction &lt;hash&gt; 1 to get JSON instead of HEX :D) but the RPC becomes slow > 60% of the blockchain because there's between 500 and 2k transactions to go through.
Make sure txindex=1 is in your config so it has the rawTX data.

As suggested by George parsing the raw files stored will make a very significant difference, to save you a lot of work;
this project (by bitpay) already does a that nicely:
https://github.com/bitpay/insight-api