I’m pretty bullish on Bitcoin so a few months ago I set out to build a “pure” Bitcoin related application. Specifically, I was looking to build an application that leveraged the Bitcoin network directly, without using any third party APIs or services. The goal behind avoiding third party services was to explore how difficult using the Bitcoin network directly is and also to embrace Bitcoin’s decentralized nature and not rely on another company to move coins.
Conceptually the way the Bitcoin network works is relatively straightforward. You move coins by creating transactions which are just messages written and cryptographically signed in a specific format and then you listen for transactions which include your addresses to keep your balance up to date. Of course, the devil is in the details and there’s a dauntingly large number of them. For example, Ken Shiriff explains how to craft a transaction by hand in Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol and it’s no easy read. Given that just crafting transactions involved so much code, I started researching existing open source libraries that facilitate working with Bitcoin.
After doing some research, it looked like the most popular approach to interfacing with the network directly was to run the bitcoind deamon and then make RPC calls to the exposed functions. Objectively, using RPC calls to bitcoind qualifies as a “pure” solution but I still didn’t love it. After a bit more searching, I came across bitcoinj which is a pure Java library for working with Bitcoin.
Unlike bitcoind, bitcoinj is a library so its designed to be embedded in other codebases and it supports simplified payment verification (SPV) which allows it to operate without downloading the entire blockchain, ~25GB as of today. On top of this, its written in Java so it’s easy to use from Scala, something I’d been looking to experiment with.
Anyway, this was my first time building something Bitcoin related and it was a positive experience. The project is still private but I’ll definitely share it once it’s released. As always, questions or comments are welcome!
Posted In: Bitcoin
Tags: bitcoin, bitcoinj, open source, spv wallet