[ANNOUNCE] picocoin and libccoin -- C-based bitcoin library and client

[jgarzik]

Hey, thanks for libccoin!!! I used it for a brute forcer for Casascius's BIP38 contest and it was very clearly laid out (at least from what I used on the library side.)

Thanks for giving it a try.

I did find a possible bug, though:

When generating a public key and Bitcoin address from a private key, the EC key is using the compressed form, when I believe it should be using the uncompressed form. I added this workaround here, but I don't know if it is the right way to go.

https://github.com/notespace/picocoin/commit/736235acabf08f2eae8856673bfd68574c8600fe

The developer consensus seems to be that uncompressed form just wastes bytes in the blockchain, which is true, so libccoin was coded to always used compressed form.

However, it might make sense to support uncompressed public keys for use cases such as yours, as long as the code still produces compressed form by default.

Such a change would involve adding "bool uncompressed" (default: false) to struct bp_key, and behaving accordingly based on that.

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[jgarzik]

A bit of a non-announcement, as it Just Worked(tm), but picocoin is happily talking to IPv6 nodes on the network.

Tor support (SOCKS5) should be added sometime soon.

[ffcitatos]

A total lamer here: if I have a private key of a bitcoin address, that has 1 BTC in it, can I spend it with picocoin? Or does it only know about transactions that are broadcast to it? Thank you.

[jgarzik]

A total lamer here: if I have a private key of a bitcoin address, that has 1 BTC in it, can I spend it with picocoin? Or does it only know about transactions that are broadcast to it? Thank you.

In the future, when picocoin is complete, yes, you can spend it with picocoin.

Right now, while picocoin is under construction, that is not yet implemented.

picocoin will provide everything a bitcoin client should provide: you can receive and spend bitcoins.

[Nachtwind]

Any progress on Picocoin? Been following this thread for a while ut it seems to be asleep for a few weeks now.. and if there is development. Any idea about compiling on windows?

[jgarzik]

Any progress on Picocoin? Been following this thread for a while ut it seems to be asleep for a few weeks now.. and if there is development. Any idea about compiling on windows?

Many devs, myself included, are on winter break ;p

[Nagato]

Everything builds and tests pass on MacOS X 10.7.  Good job on this code, you've written the client Satoshi should have.

Satoshi could not have written a light client...

[em3rgentOrdr]

I downloaded the lastest code and was able to compile and run on both my x86-64 machine and my Raspberry PI arm marchine.  However, when I try running netsync, both machines fail and say all the ip addresses are unrechable:

socket connect 2a02:348:5e:5a29::1: Network is unreachable
net: failed to start connection to 2a02:348:5e:5a29::1
net: connect 69.164.196.4 failed: Connection refused

Regular bitcoin client works fine on my x86-64 machine, so I don't think my router blocking ports could be the problem.  Any ideas?

(I am wanting to turn my PI into a lightweight pay-to-download fileserver...so any suggestions are helpful.  I'd want to set it up so people can download a file after their bitcoin transaction gets a couple confirmations.)

[rupy]

Hey I'm onto this RPi with free colocation path aswell.

Bitcoind consumes to much memory and diskspace to be a viable option.

I'll try and compile this to see if it runs ok.

When will payment be added?

Edit: I'm a complete noob, how do I build picocoin?

sudo apt-get install libevent-dev libjansson-dev automake libglib2.0-dev

[Chaoskampf]

Have there been any advances lately? It's a really awesome project and I hope it reaches a stable release sometime soon. Great work jgarzik!

[jgarzik]

Have there been any advances lately? It's a really awesome project and I hope it reaches a stable release sometime soon. Great work jgarzik!

Some slow advances.  The library is seeing use in various places, as the base for custom bitcoin apps that need to be really fast.

The two clients, "brd" (block relay daemon) and "picocoin" (SPV client) remain incomplete and have not seen much attention.

The library, libccoin, is largely feature complete and available for use today.

[Aido]

Is this project dead or stalled? I see that github hasn't had a commit in over 2 months now.

Also, any advice on whether incorporating Sophia (http://www.sphia.org/) is a good or a bad idea?

[jgarzik]

Is this project dead or stalled? I see that github hasn't had a commit in over 2 months now.

Stalled, though I am aware of at least two people working on embedded projects based on libccoin.

This Christmas I'm hoping to finish the client.

Also, any advice on whether incorporating Sophia (http://www.sphia.org/) is a good or a bad idea?

Seems worth checking out.  Most key/value databases cannot scale to the millions of records and data access patterns that bitcoin requires, so it requires careful evaluation.

[Aido]

Most key/value databases cannot scale to the millions of records and data access patterns that bitcoin requires, so it requires careful evaluation.

Indeed; but the Sophia benchmarks compared to LevelDB look promising, if they are to be believed.

LMDB (http://symas.com/mdb/) looks interesting too. Not sure about the OpenLDAP license though.

[Nummum]

I am thinking of using the libccoin and picocoin code as the basis of an alternative currency I am developing.

More details here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=399728.0

The main purpose of this alt currency is educational for me and to be a challenge to which I hope I can rise. I do not want to follow the same route as a lot of other alt currencies, cloning the bitcoin code and making a few minor changes. Not much can be learned from this.

Before I jump in and start writing code I would like an expert opinion. For the type of altcoin I intend to develop is libccoin/picocoin a good foundation to build upon or am I wasting my time? I know the picocoin code is not complete but that is part of the challenge I have set myself.

[Aido]

From the Bitcoin with Raspberry Pithread:

I had bitcoind 0.8.1 running on a Raspberry Pi and performance was terrible.....very high CPU usage and too many r/w operations.

Jeff Garzik, one of the core bitcoin developers, is writing a lightweight C library called libccoin and a client called picocoin.

When finished this should be suitable for running on low powered devices like a Raspberry Pi.

Does anyone know the status of picocoin? I can't wait for a stable version. It would help my project immensely.

There are a few people (i.e. me and someone else   ) interested in getting picocoin running on a Raspberry Pi. Has there been any further progress of late?

[jgarzik]

No recent progress, but any and all pull requests will be reviewed, tested and merged with lightning speed

[thomas92911]

Nice work, thanks.

[jgarzik]

Minor update for a script parsing bug pushed to git.

[Aido]

A poor first attempt at writing some TX_MULTISIG code here:

https://github.com/aido/picocoin/commit/d6635879c1f6ab4812a0b123db3800d555c2993d

It's probably not worthy of a pull request but there may be something of use that can be copied and pasted into the main code.