Tag Archives: golang

Bitcoin, btcd, btcwallet, colored coins, Golang

Monetas brings colored coins to btcd

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This article is syndicated from the Monetas blog with the approval of the author, Justus Ranvier.

As a company with current and planned blockchain-synergistic products, Monetas is strongly invested in Bitcoin wallet development. After choosing btcwallet from Conformal Systems as our technical foundation for blockchain integration, Monetas is currently devoting four full-time software engineers to adding features and improvements to btcwallet.

One of those features is colored coin support. This article will explain colored coins, and how we are implementing them in btcwallet, and what capabilities these changes entail for both Monetas and Conformal.

colored-1

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Bitcoin, Golang

btcwallet and btcgui: Wallet handling for btcd

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Today Conformal is announcing alpha releases of btcwallet and btcgui, the wallet components of btcd, written in Go. We announced in a recent blog post that btcd, our full node Bitcoin implementation, was ready for public testing. We also announced that wallet functionality was being implemented separately and would be coming in the near future. Although our wallet daemon and GUI interface are not yet ready for production use, we feel they have progressed to the point where early adopters can begin testing their functionality on the Bitcoin Testnet network.

Our btcd blog post briefly discussed why wallet functionality is not a part of btcd. It highlighted various reasons why we believe separating wallet handling from blockchain handling improves on the integrated wallet design used by bitcoind and bitcoin-qt. This post will continue on that topic, further exploring the details of why a multiprocess wallet design was chosen, how such a design is beneficial to the Bitcoin community as a whole, and the implementation details this design.
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Coinvoice

Coinvoice: Invoice in USD, receive BTC

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Coinvoice logo

I am excited to announce Coinvoice, a new Bitcoin payment processing service that allows businesses to invoice for goods and services worldwide in U.S. Dollars (USD) and get paid in Bitcoins (BTC). Coinvoice makes it easy for any merchant to receive BTC without them or their customers having to worry about the infrastructure necessary to conduct and process these transactions. So long as the merchant’s customers can pay in USD via wire transfer, certified check or money order, Coinvoice will pay out to the merchant in BTC.

The idea for Coinvoice arose out of a handful of conversations I had regarding Bitcoins and receiving payment for invoices using cryptocurrencies more generally. I had remarked to one of my associates that “it would be great to take payment for invoices in BTC”, but I acknowledged that it was a serious pain point to dictate to all of your customers “now you need to go get BTC to pay me”. Then I went on to suggest I would be willing to give a discount on the invoice amount if they paid in BTC, and the seed for Coinvoice was sowed.

settle payments in BTC

settle payments in BTC

Beyond making a business out of the scenario I described above, Coinvoice is meant to fulfill a vital need in the Bitcoin economy: putting BTC in the hands of business owners with less friction. Enabling businesses to more easily access BTC is overall a positive thing for the Bitcoin economy, and it will have positive secondary effects, e.g. more customers for sites that accept direct BTC payments. More generically, Coinvoice is meant to enable payment settlement from USD to BTC, whereas most existing payment processing services are built to facilitate settlement from BTC to USD or solely in BTC.

Our target audience with Coinvoice is pretty much any business that wants to have customers pay in USD and ultimately receive BTC as payment for goods and services. A few examples of the kinds of businesses I’m talking about are:

  • IT contractor that invoices for their work at the end of each month
  • Chinese manufacturer that sells goods in the US
  • Vanuatu IBC that licenses intellectual property in the US

Coinvoice is meant to be used in a “traditional” business setting where invoices are issued and paid a number of days afterwards.

We are looking forward to enabling businesses to settle payments in BTC and helping grow the larger Bitcoin ecosystem. Coinvoice provides you with a safe, private, reliable and secure way for your business to receive BTC.

Bitcoin, Golang

gotk3: GTK3 the Go way!

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Today marks the first release of gotk3, Conformal’s own GTK3 bindings for Go (available on Github here). These bindings were developed out of a frustration with other GTK bindings for Go either using ancient versions of GTK, not handling memory in a way a Go developer would expect, or simply not working at all on our developers’ OpenBSD and Bitrig machines. gotk3 is Conformal’s response to these issues and attempts to be the best solution for developing new GTK applications with Go.

One of the goals for developing gotk3 was to perform memory management in a very Go-like manner. Like many libraries which must handle memory management manually due to the language they are implemented with, GLib (and GTK which uses it) uses reference counting to determine when an object will never again be used and is ready to be freed, releasing the memory resources it required back to the operating system. However, GLib chooses not to use traditional reference counting, but instead uses a quirky variant called “floating references” to achieve this goal. The rest of this post will cover what floating references do, why they exist, and how gotk3 works around this design to handle memory the way a Go developer expects.

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