JoCoin

JoCoin is an attempt to implement the more interesting parts of Bitcoin that I've come across in my readings. It's a grey-box reimplementation, having only read high-level descriptions of what it is and how it works. For fun bonus points, I also implemented RSA key generation and signatures from scratch.

How to play with JoCoin

1. Checkout the code.

2. Generate yourself a key:

      python client.py genkeys > my.key
   

3. Start a node locally:

      python node.py -k my.key
   

   This will start mining with your key. Give it a few minutes (or change the difficulty level in jocoin/chain.py) to create some JoCoins.

4. Generate another key, say, myother.key

5. Start another node, using the first node as the seed

      python node.py -k myother.key localhost 9999
   

6. Interact with your node using the client

   a. Check your balance:

      python client.py balance my.key
   

   b. Transfer some JoCoins

      python client.py transfer my.key myother.key 1.23
   

Run the client.py script with the -h argument for more information on possible actions the client can take.

Things that aren't so great

See the TODO file for things left undone. Most notably, this makes no effort to be efficient, as i was primarily interested in learning about how BTC protects the integrity of the blockchain. I also kind of punted a little bit on making the networking and threading aspects bulletproof because, again, that wasn't the part I was interested in.