Dave Collins 94845326b5 Use testable example and update doc.go README.md.

This commit moves the ProcessBlock example to a test file so it integrates
nicely with Go's example tooling.

This allows the example output to be tested as a part of running the
normal Go tests to help ensure it doesn't get out of date with the code.
It is also nice to have the example in one place rather than repeating it
in doc.go and README.md.

Links and information about the example have been incldued in doc.go and
README.md in place of the example.

2014-07-08 01:45:28 -05:00

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btcchain

[] (https://travis-ci.org/conformal/btcchain)

Package btcchain implements bitcoin block handling and chain selection rules. The test coverage is currently only around 60%, but will be increasing over time. See test_coverage.txt for the gocov coverage report. Alternatively, if you are running a POSIX OS, you can run the cov_report.sh script for a real-time report. Package btcchain is licensed under the liberal ISC license.

There is an associated blog post about the release of this package here.

This package is one of the core packages from btcd, an alternative full-node implementation of bitcoin which is under active development by Conformal. Although it was primarily written for btcd, this package has intentionally been designed so it can be used as a standalone package for any projects needing to handle processing of blocks into the bitcoin block chain.

Documentation

[] (http://godoc.org/github.com/conformal/btcchain)

Full go doc style documentation for the project can be viewed online without installing this package by using the GoDoc site here: http://godoc.org/github.com/conformal/btcchain

You can also view the documentation locally once the package is installed with the godoc tool by running godoc -http=":6060" and pointing your browser to http://localhost:6060/pkg/github.com/conformal/btcchain

Installation

$ go get github.com/conformal/btcchain

Bitcoin Chain Processing Overview

Before a block is allowed into the block chain, it must go through an intensive series of validation rules. The following list serves as a general outline of those rules to provide some intuition into what is going on under the hood, but is by no means exhaustive:

Reject duplicate blocks
Perform a series of sanity checks on the block and its transactions such as verifying proof of work, timestamps, number and character of transactions, transaction amounts, script complexity, and merkle root calculations
Compare the block against predetermined checkpoints for expected timestamps and difficulty based on elapsed time since the checkpoint
Save the most recent orphan blocks for a limited time in case their parent blocks become available
Stop processing if the block is an orphan as the rest of the processing depends on the block's position within the block chain
Perform a series of more thorough checks that depend on the block's position within the block chain such as verifying block difficulties adhere to difficulty retarget rules, timestamps are after the median of the last several blocks, all transactions are finalized, checkpoint blocks match, and block versions are in line with the previous blocks
Determine how the block fits into the chain and perform different actions accordingly in order to ensure any side chains which have higher difficulty than the main chain become the new main chain
When a block is being connected to the main chain (either through reorganization of a side chain to the main chain or just extending the main chain), perform further checks on the block's transactions such as verifying transaction duplicates, script complexity for the combination of connected scripts, coinbase maturity, double spends, and connected transaction values
Run the transaction scripts to verify the spender is allowed to spend the coins
Insert the block into the block database

Examples

[ProcessBlock Example] (http://godoc.org/github.com/conformal/btcchain#example-ProcessBlock)
Demonstrates how to create a new chain instance and use ProcessBlock to attempt to attempt add a block to the chain. This example intentionally attempts to insert a duplicate genesis block to illustrate how an invalid block is handled.

TODO

Increase test coverage

GPG Verification Key

All official release tags are signed by Conformal so users can ensure the code has not been tampered with and is coming from Conformal. To verify the signature perform the following:

Download the public key from the Conformal website at https://opensource.conformal.com/GIT-GPG-KEY-conformal.txt
Import the public key into your GPG keyring:
```
gpg --import GIT-GPG-KEY-conformal.txt
```
Verify the release tag with the following command where TAG_NAME is a placeholder for the specific tag:
```
git tag -v TAG_NAME
```

License

Package btcchain is licensed under the liberal ISC License.

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