nicolafiorillo / bitcoin_rules

A Bitcoin node written in Rust almost from scratch.

a Bitcoin (the protocol) node written in Rust mainly for educational purposes

Status

Motivation and other info

There's no better way to learn how something works than by trying to reproduce it.

Paul Graham, "How to Do Great Work"

A Bitcoin node is the backbone of the Bitcoin network, functioning as a participant that validates transactions, maintains a copy of the blockchain, and ensure the integrity of the blockchain by enforcing consensus rules.

The Bitcoin_rules! project is a comprehensive endeavor aimed at exploring the intricacies of Bitcoin's protocol, staring from the very basics of the protocol and building up to a fully functional Bitcoin node, (almost) from scratch. Bitcoin_rules! goes beyond the surface-level understanding of Bitcoin: we delve into the technical aspects of building a full node, offering a deep dive into the inner workings of the Bitcoin network, protocol, and consensus.

Moreover, consider this as a contribute to the Bitcoin spread and adoption.

See references for documentations, references, and articles used building Bitcoin_rules!. See also roadmap for the list of features and milestones.

Do not use this code in production stuff. Completeness, stability, and expecially security are not guaranteed.

Getting started

At time main() is almost empty. We are working on structures and algorithms. For the moment, clone the repo and build it with:

cargo build

Run the unit tests:

cargo test --lib --bins

Run unit tests only (fast):

cargo test --lib --bins

Run unit tests and integration tests (slow):

cargo test

Run the node (cli app):

cargo run --bin brn

Feedback

Feedback are welcome! Please open an issue or PR.

Support

If you want to support this project, you can donate to:

• BTCPayServer
• Paypal

Acknowledgments

• Rust for being a great language.
• Satoshi Nakamoto for bringing us here.

bitcoin_rules's Issues

Unit test results in README.md

Show unit test results in README.md (e.g. number of tests passed/failed.

Github actions.

Configure Github actions for cross compilation x86 (Mac, Windows, Linux).

Substitute `rug` with custom implementation of u256.

In order to minimize dependencies, we need to implement a custom u256 type with the minimum set of operation needed for ECDSA calculations.

Error compiling on Windows

gmp-mpfr-sys dependency (coming via rug) is not supported in Windows: https://docs.rs/gmp-mpfr-sys/1.4.0/gmp_mpfr_sys/index.html#building-on-windows

Minimize `clone()` usage.

Despite clone() usage is not considered a bad practice, we will try to minimize usage for performances improvement..

Better error management.

Consider to use a global Error enum in order to uniform error set and not pollute the code with propagating error approach.

Despite the goal of Bitcoin_rules! is to minimize dependencies, we can find alternative approach in https://github.com/dtolnay/anyhow or https://github.com/dtolnay/thiserror

Array bounds checking.

Verify array bounds, especially in deserialization.