chaingun

A highly experimental/unorganized fledgling Bitcoin implementation written in Clojure. A sandbox for my brain.

Predominantly a test-bed for hilarious abstractions and unfamiliar libraries as I figure things out.

Current features so far

• Implements most of the wire protocol (codec.clj) and can talk to nodes (like exchanging the version/verack handshake and downloading blocks)
• Stores the Bitcoin blockchain in a Datomic database
• Parses serialized blocks from ~/.bitcoin/blkXXXXX.dat files and can insert them into its db
• Exposes a blockexplorer.com-like interface for browsing the contents of its db locally (explorer.clj)
• Includes a simple validation stack-machine (script.clj)

Current goals

• Import full blockchain. - While I've been able to parse every blkXXXXX.dat file that I've tried, I haven't yet attempted to parse all of them into the database at once.
• Implement OP_CHECKSIG and other non-trival script ops. - The abstraction in script.clj is pleasant and makes almost all of the ops trivial to implement, but the non-trivial ops need to be implemented to justify the abstraction before moving on.

Prerequisites

1. Java JDK version 6 or later.
2. To compile chaingun into a .jar, you'll need Clojure's build tool: Leiningen

Install & Import Demo

INSTALL.md (Note: out of date)

Walks through the process of:

1. Downloading and compiling chaingun
2. Setting up Datomic (database)
3. Parsing the first 300 blocks of the blockchain into Datomic
4. Exploring the local blockchain with chaingun's explorer.

Screenshots

Local Blockchain Explorer