Video of presentation can be found here.
Transcript of presentation can be found here.
Note: instead of 'generate', use 'generatetoaddress'
For more discussion of regtest and how it compares to the proposed signet see here and here.
The goal of this presentation is to set up a development environment, where you can run multiple nodes in a simulated environment without having to sync to testnet. We will set up 3 nodes and experiment with the cli/rpc commands to send transactions between nodes and analyze the makeup of a transaction.
If you don't have the Bitcoin Core software installed on your computer, you can install it here.
Remember to add bitcoind and bitcoin-cli to your path. If you don't know how, raise your hand.
This script runs 3 regtest nodes
bash run.sh
(as regtest, preceed following commands with bitcoin-cli -regtest)
Just the three of us?
getpeerinfo
How much money do we have?
getbalance
Looks like we're broke. Anyone know why?
Have there been any blocks mined? Without blocks we're all broke!
getblockchaininfo
First, we need to grab an address from someone to mine to:
getnewaddress
Notice that the height is 0. This means we need to mine some blocks. In regtest we can mine without POW:
generatetoaddress 1 <address generated above>
Now we're rich -- 50 bitcoins!
getbalance
Still 0. What happened? In bitcoin we have a 100 block maturity time for newly mined coinbase transactions (explanation
Let's mine 100 more (to any address in our network) -- giving us 1 mature transaction
generatetoaddress 100 <address>
Are we rich yet?
getbalance
Yes, we are rich!
We ran 3 nodes. The default regtest node now has 50 bitcoins, but Alice and Bob are still broke. In fact, they don't even have bitcoin addresses yet.
To run bitcoin-cli commands as alice, you can source aliases.sh, which will create alice-cli and bob-cli terminal aliases that run bitcoin-cli commands with the correct parameters for Bob and Alice.
alice-cli getbalance
Alice is broke as expected
alice-cli getnewaddress
Let's send Alice some coin
bitcoin-cli -regtest sendtoaddress <alice's address from above> 1
alice-cli getbalance
Alice is still broke
alice-cli listunspent 0
The 0 is for minimum confirmations, now we see Alice's transaction as unconfirmed, it will show in her balance once a block is mined.
Exercise: send a transaction from Alice to Bob and verify that Bob has received
makeup of a transaction
run simulate.js and show how it is useful
create, sign and send raw transactions
create, sign and send multisig transaction
This project is a little easier to use than bitcoin-cli. If you'd like, install it:
git clone https://github.com/rsbondi/nodes-debug.git
cd nodes-debug
npm run dev
or follow the readme to build and run the binary
Assuming bitcoin-qt is in your path and you are in the project directory with no instances running
./qt.sh
node simulate.js will randomly create transaction and mine on default regtest node. This will give more of a real world feel with mempool transactions and blocks getting automatically mined. Be sure that before running you mine enough on the default node with the generate command so it will have money to spend
Learning-Bitcoin-from-the-Command-Line This is a good hardcore deep dive into the CLI
A Map of the Bitcoin Core RPC API across Versions A nice tabular view of all the RPC commands and the history of changes, showing deprecation, removal and addition of commands per version.