We are pleased to announce that btcd, our full-node bitcoind alternative written in Go, is finally ready for public testing!

The installation instructions and source code can be found on github at:

https://github.com/conformal/btcd

A Brief History

Back in May, we first announced our plans to release btcd. A week later we released our first core package from btcd, btcwire, and announced our plans to continue releasing the component packages of btcd in a staggered fashion.

Over the next month, we released btcjson, btcdb, and btcscript. Then in mid-July we released btcchain at which time we announced btcd was next. At that point, btcd had most of the core bits and we figured we’d be releasing it within a few weeks. Well, as you have no doubt noticed, it is now 10 weeks later…
Continue reading →

Following up on our previous releases (btcwire, btcjson, btcutil, and btcdb) we are happy to announce btcscript, the script package from btcd:

https://github.com/conformal/btcscript

btcscript provides code and data structures to parse and execute bitcoin scripts. The scripting system bitcoin uses is a stack-based, FORTH-like language. It is not turing complete by design (as adding a full turing complete language opens up all sorts of potential complications and problems), but it still provides a fair amount of power.

Continue reading →

Previously, we released btcwire and btcjson and we are now releasing btcdb, the database package from btcd:

https://github.com/conformal/btcdb

As of late May 2013, there are over 238,000 blocks in the bitcoin blockchain and over 18 million transactions. This works out to be slightly under 11 GB of data when including transaction metadata. btcdb provides an efficient and relatively simple way to store and access this dataset from Go. Although it was built with btcd in mind, there are certainly other potential uses for it and we have designed the interface with that flexibility in mind. Unlike the other packages we have released, it is likely that there will be some minor interface changes as we continue to develop btcdb.
Continue reading →

We recently announced btcd, an alternative full-node implementation of the bitcoin wire protocol and block validation written in Go that is under active development.

btcwire was the first package released, and now we would like to announce the public preview of our second package, btcjson, the JSON-RPC package from btcd:

https://github.com/conformal/btcjson

Continue reading →

As was recently announced in a previous blog (here), btcd is an alternative full-node implementation of the bitcoin wire protocol and block validation written in Go that is currently under active development.

We’d now like to announce a public preview of one of the core packages from btcd.  The package is named btcwire and it implements the bitcoin wire protocol.  The code can be reviewed on github here:

https://github.com/conformal/btcwire

Overall Package Design

At a high level, this package provides support for marshalling and unmarshalling supported bitcoin messages to and from the wire. This package does not deal with the specifics of message handling such as what to do when a message is received. This provides the caller with a high level of flexibility.
Continue reading →

btcd is an alternative full-node implementation of the bitcoin protocol written in Go and is currently under active development. btcd has been under development for 10 weeks and the initial code is nearly ready for public release. We feel that by providing an alternative to bitcoind we can substantially improve the diversity and resilience of the bitcoin ecosystem and infrastructure.

A number of us at Conformal Systems had been keeping an eye on bitcoin as passive observers for the past couple years since bitcoin combines technologies that are already of interest to us: practical use of cryptography, distributed systems, and electronic payments. In January 2013 I had one of our developers, David Hill, attempt to port bitcoind and its GUI to Bitrig, an OS that several of our developers forked from OpenBSD. David encountered several problems with porting to Bitrig and in the process found issues with unit tests, non-portable functions and seeding of a PRNG. While pushing to get the port complete, it was clear that it would take a lot more effort than usual to complete this port. After seeing these issues with the porting, I felt that the bitcoin ecosystem could use an alternative to bitcoind.
Continue reading →