Bitcoin Forum

Download cbitcoin 1.0-alpha-4 here: http://cbitcoin.com/

cbitcoin is an open-source bitcoin library written in C99. It is designed to make developing bitcoin applications easier. It provides a set of fundamental bitcoin functions which allow developers to create a diverse range of bitcoin software. This library will be the foundation for a new bitcoin client currently under the code-name BitEagle.

I've posted this in "Bitcoin Discussion" with a new topic because I would like to appeal for funding from the wider community. Luckily one person has volunteered to provide some design elements for cbitcoin (which is pending), but there will almost certainly be other costs involved. Unless I can find volunteers, I will need to pay for some programming work which I am unable to complete personally. I may need to fund some additional design work and I may also use some donations to offer bounties for those that can find critical bugs. Excess donations will likely go towards projects that use cbitcoin, including BitEagle which will involve a lot more work.

If anyone would like to support the project please donate to -> 1D5A1q5d192j5gYuWiP3CSE5fcaaZxe6E9

I would also appreciate if anyone can aid with the testing of cbitcoin or make improvements to the code. Contributions can be made through the github repository: https://github.com/MatthewLM/cbitcoin/ and feedback or questions can be sent to cbitcoin@thelibertyportal.com. Contributors will have their name added to the README and website.

I welcome comments and questions.

Thank you.

I'm quite amazed by how fast you've been coding this.  Congrats.

Do you support IRC bootstrapping in the test network ?  I've searched occurrences of "irc" in your code and I've found nothing relevant.

No, there is no IRC bootstrapping. Developers that use the library will need to specify starting network addresses and cbitcoin will take care of the communication for these peers.

cbitcoin also contains some compatibility issues with the test network because the test network has some different behaviour to the live network which I'll get around to fixing. I should have done that before I considered it alpha really. Oh well.


Thanks, hopefully things will progress faster considering I've learned a lot but testing is often the most tedious part.

You know what would be cool?   Some kind of a bitcoin standard test-bench, with predefined addresses, keys, transactions and so on, that all clients in all languages could use as a reference for testing.

congrats for following through on this!

I did take many of the script tests from the C++ bitcoin client and I should look at the other tests to add to mine, though sometimes it complicated trying to copy from C++ client.  


:) Still got a lot to do, especially with BitEagle but I'll get through it all... eventually. I've got some exciting stuff planned.

Cool stuff, keep it up!

Btw quick question, is BitEagle going to be a standalone client or a light client?

Donation sent. This is an excellent project. I'm amazed that people have btc to throw into ponzis but none for worthy projects that would benefit their own bitcoin holdings in the long term.

Imagine what 500,000 bitcoins would have built?

Damn it you make me feel guilty about not having given anything already.  I'll add half a bitcoin.

Good.  :)

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that many of the people involved in the Ponzi schemes are not involved with the Bitcoin community at all. They are simply buying BTC to get in on the schemes.

BitEagle will use SPV combined with a server-side full node. The server is there to behave as a trusted node to protect against attacks against your internet connection. Unlike some people have misbelieved this does not mean the security depends on the server because the client software will still do SPV validation on the bitcoin network. I will release the server-side full validation code as open-source so someone could make a fully validating client with it. With BitEagle I'm aiming to provide an intelligent mixture of security and convenience. More details will follow at a later date since it's still quite conceptual at this stage.


Thank you very much for the donation. And I hope to ensure that this is a worthy project. ;-)


Thank you!

I don't believe you'd have to go out too far on the limb.

Amazing work @MatthewLM, expect some pull-requests coming in :)

Thanks. Contributions are very much welcome. Look out for "???" in comments. I put "???" wherever I'm unsure about something or I think something could be improved. Be wary of the documentation which is incomplete and wrong is areas (Contributions to improved documentation would be helpful).

good idea!

Do you plan on displacing Bitcoind with your implementation?

BitEagle will be an alternative client. If people want to use it in place of bitcoind (There should be a library and daemon interface) they can, but if they want to keep bitcoind then that's up to them. So "displace" isn't the word.

Feel free to be better than what's out there. Ha.

a little bit of btc love coming your way mate - I don't even develop but I can see the benefit of this being in the community, so thanks for spending the time on it.

is it a Dynamic Shared library (dso/dylib/dll) ?

Well, just wanted to come back and say that libevent appears to officially support Windows. Hell, there was even a libmemcached v0.42 port for Windows and then I was able to port PushPool to Windows.

Thank you.


The build script compiles shared/dynamic libraries for Linux and OSX. There is no Windows support yet. You can build or use the source code any way you want of-course.


Though cbitcoin will likely not be windows friendly. It would be good for any Windows developers to see if they can get it to work in Windows. I understand that the Windows C compiler doesn't support C99 so that will be a problem, though the code can be modified for C89 to compile for Windows or some other compiler can be used if it exists.

Small donation sent, keep up the great work!

Nice work, and congratulations on the release!

Thanks to both of you.

I'm working on the full validating node software now. Somewhat soon I should commit some code to https://github.com/MatthewLM/BitEagle-FullNode This should aid with the testing of cbitcoin as I code the components for BitEagle.

I don't think people should be storing and accessing Bitcoins through a Windows operating system anyways, especially with an NSA backdoor.

1.0 Alpha 2 is now available for download: http://cbitcoin.com.

I removed some include directives that should not be there. I fixed some warnings by changing the services bitfield to CBVersionServices and fixed the error handling in the CBNetworkCommunicator code. See commits here: https://github.com/MatthewLM/cbitcoin/commits/alpha

BTC sent. Very good project, especially as people have been complaining about the satoshi client for ages...

Thank you very much for the donation.


I cannot say I'll be able to satisfy every need and complaint but I am all ears to suggestions and comments about bitcoin.

Very cool, 0.5 BTC (plus some random decimals to clean up my wallet) sent.

Thanks, I'm sure those random digits will come in handy.  ;D

I've got some code up for the fully validating node software: https://github.com/MatthewLM/BitEagle-FullNode

Hopefully that will come along smoothly.

Alpha 3 is released. In this release the CBAddressManager test is fixed for new version numbers, the README has been improved, an old copyright notice has been removed since it is not needed and a problem with the script interpreter was fixed.

Damn.  Just noticed this thread is forked.  What the heck I'll cross-post:

To compile your libraries on my 32-bits, debian GNU/linux host, I had to change line 94 of BUILD.py (why not use a makefile, btw?):

into:

Also, in src/structures/CBBigInt/CBBigInt.c, line 43:

into:

Then all compilation seems fine, but linking failed:
LINKING ./build/bin/libcbitcoin.so
gcc: error: unrecognized command line option ‘-flat_namespace’

so I just removed this option.  I hope it's ok.

I want to try to make an interface to this in Perl6, using the NativeCall (https://github.com/jnthn/zavolaj/) module.  If I succeed, it would be really cool.

I replied in the other thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=80521.msg1231003#msg1231003). The reason I made a thread here is to try and obtain interest from non technical people who do not look at the "Development & Technical Discussion" forum. I don't know what to do really. Should the threads be merged into one thread on one of the forums? I guess that's up to any of the moderators if they so choose.

0.2 bitcoins sent! will be looking to donate much more next month!

Keep it up  :D

Thank you very much.  :)

You know what would help to raise you more money MatthewLM? A nice little PR post where you could explain a little bit more about who you are, what are your goals and a donation goal. I'm sure people would be really generous if you could properly reach their awareness. Have you thought about any of this? Would you like some help with that?

I replied to Hazek in a PM and said I need to think more about and plan for the direction and organisation of cbitcoin over the next few weeks. I'm willing to hear any general suggestions people have about the project in the meantime, so do not be hesitant to reply in this thread, PM me or email cbitcoin@thelibertyportal.com if you have anything to say or if you'd like to be involved in any way.

I hope to have more details about my plans reasonably soon, so subscribe to this thread to keep updated.

1.0 Alpha 4 is now available to download: http://cbitcoin.com/

This release fixes issues with the CBBigInt code, an issue with compilation and an issue with CBSubScriptRemoveSignature.

cbitcoin 1.0 is discontinued as many new features and improvements are in development for cbitcoin 2.0 and all work will go towards that from now on.

matthew how is your work going?

It's coming along piece by piece. I'm currently improving some of the old code in preparation for writing the remaining network node code. Recently I completed the implementation of the full validator. If all goes well then I should have everything implemented (Not tested) by a couple of months, but I am quite busy with other things and I can't be sure of anything.

Here is the new topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=123488.msg1457871#msg1457871

People can watch the github repository to keep updated: https://github.com/MatthewLM/cbitcoin/