bitc is a thin SPV bitcoin client.
- 100% C code,
- support for linux, mac, OpenBSD platforms,
- console based: uses ncurses,
- home grown async network i/o stack,
- home grown poll loop,
- home grown bitcoin engine,
- supports encrypted wallet,
- supports connecting via Tor/Socks5,
- multi-threaded,
- valgrind clean.
WARNING: this app is under development and may contain critical bugs.
- cJSON: a C library to parse JSON objects. It's released under MIT license. http://sourceforge.net/projects/cjson/
- libcurl: an http library. It's released under a MIT/X derivate license.
http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/ - LevelDB: Google's key value store, released under the BSD 3-Clause License.
https://code.google.com/p/leveldb/ - OpenSSL: crypto library.
https://www.openssl.org/
You first need to install the libraries this app uses:
# sudo apt-get install git make clang libssl-dev
# sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libncurses5-dev
# sudo apt-get install libleveldb-dev libsnappy-dev
# sudo apt-get install libstdc++-4.8-dev
then clone the git repository:
# git clone https://github.com/bit-c/bitc.git
finally build and launch:
# cd bitc && make
# ./bitc
You need to install libcurl, leveldb, libsnappy and ncurses via port
or brew
.
The first time you launch the app, a message will notify you of the list of files & directory it uses.
bitc uses the folder ~/.bitc
to store various items:
what | where | avg size |
---|---|---|
block headers | ~/.bitc/headers.dat | ~ 20MB |
peer IP addresses | ~/.bitc/peers.dat | ~ 2MB |
transaction database | ~/.bitc/txdb | < 1MB |
config file | ~/.bitc/main.cfg | < 1KB |
wallet keys | ~/.bitc/wallet.cfg | < 1KB |
tx-label file | ~/.bitc/tx-labels.cfg | < 1KB |
contacts file | ~/.bitc/contacts.cfg | < 1KB |
A log file is generated in /tmp/bitc-$USER.log
.
To navigate the UI:
<left>
and<right>
allow you to change panel,<CTRL>
+t
to initiate a transaction,- type
q
orback quote
to exit.
bitc has support for encrypted wallets. The first time you launch the app, it will automatically generate a new bitcoin address for you, and the wallet file will have private key unencrypted.
To turn on encryption, or to change the encryption password:
# ./bitc -e
The next time you launch the app, you may or may not specify -p
on
the command line. If you do, you will be able to initiate transactions. If you
do not the dashboard will still be functional but you won't be able to
initiate transactions.
Note that bitc encrypts each private key separately.
WARNING: please remember to make back-ups.
You need to modify your ~/.bitc/wallet.cfg
so that it contains the private
key as exported by bitcoin-qt
with the command dumpprivkey
. More on that
later.
Bitc can route all outgoing TCP connections through a socks5 proxy. Since TOR implements a SOCKS5 proxy, you just need to put the entry:
network.useSocks5="true"
in your main config file to use bitc over Tor (for a local Tor client). If the Tor proxy is not running locally, you need to modify the config options:
socks5.hostname="localhost"
socks5.port=9050
.. in the file ~/.bitc/main.cfg
. The default hostname:port
is
localhost:9050
on linux, and localhost:9150
on mac.
If you tag a key as
key0.spendable = "FALSE"
in your ~/.bitc/wallet.cfg
, bitc won't attempt to spend the bitcoins held by
this address. This is not quite like a watch-only address, but we'll get there
eventually.
There are still a variety of things that need to be fixed or implemented (cf TODO file), and some of these may explain the behavior you're seeing. If bitc crashes, please collect the log file along with the core dump and open a ticket on github:
https://github.com/bit-c/bitc/issues
Feel free to reach out to me if you have any feedback or if you're planning to use this code in interesting ways.
mailto:austruym@gmail.com PGP: 1C774FA3925A3076752B2741054E32DFBEE883DB