Bitcoin Core Setup

Bitcoin is a P2P computer application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that can be downloaded from bitcoin.org.

Once installed, you will need to download and verify the entire blockchain. Full nodes (default) store all historical block data on your device while pruned nodes verify then delete older data to save space.

Mainnet (default) allows you to use the actual bitcoin network and blockchain. Testnet is a smaller, separate blockchain for test transactions using worthless tBTC.

Here is a table of 5 configuration options when running a node:

All options can store UTXOs, send, and receive transactions.

⮡  Learn how to setup up a Bitcoin node

Configuration

Bitcoin Core can be configured by using a bitcoin.conf text file, or by adding configuration flags at startup.

Some configuration options include:

• Mode: Mainnet (default), Testnet, or Regtest
• Prune Amount: Maximum block size to store
• Server: Allow node to listen for API requests
• Transaction Indexing: Store transaction indexes for complete blockchain lookup
• RPC Login Info: Credentials to access node from a server
• Listen: Serve blocks to other users

An example bitcoin.conf file might look like this:

mainnet=1
server=1
prune=5500
rpcuser=myusername
rpcpassword=mypassword

Another way apply the same configurations would be to start the node using the same options and a hyphen in front of each:

bitcoind -mainnet=1 -server=1 -prune=5500 -rpcuser=myusername -rpcpassword=mypassword

⮡  Learn about Bitcoin Configuration

⮡  View Bitcoin Config Reference

Console Commands

Bitcoin allows you to perform dozens of commands including:

• Getting block/transaction information
• Getting network/mining data
• Tracking UTXOs
• Creating addresses
• Sending transactions

Commands can be performed in the Bitcoin-qt console

>> getblockcount
664,029

Commands can also be done with the bitcoin-cli if a node is running

$ bitcoin-cli getblockcount
664,029

Commands can also be done using the RPC API remotely with HTTP requests.

curl --user myusername --data-binary '{"jsonrpc": "1.0", "id":"curltest", "method": "getblockcount", "params": [] }' -H 'content-type: text/plain;' http://127.0.0.1:8332/

⮡  View RPC Commands Reference

RPC Server

Bitcoin commands can be called with user-created or third-party applications using the JSON RPC API. This allows the user to perform HTTP requests directly to their node.

For example, here is how you would get the Best block hash using the JSON RPC API with curl:

curl --user myusername --data-binary '{"jsonrpc": "1.0", "id":"curltest", "method": "getbestblockhash", "params": [] }' -H 'content-type: text/plain;' http://127.0.0.1:8332/

It is possible to build applications that interact with this API using any of these languages:

Python, Ruby, Erlang, PHP, Java, Perl, Go, .NET (C#), Node.js, Deno, Clojure, C, C++, and more.

Building an RPC Server will allow you to create any applications you like on top of your bitcoin node.

Tutorial for setting up a bitcoin RPC server coming soon!

Building Applications

Once you have a Bitcoin node and RPC Server setup, you can create applications and user interfaces.

Bitcoin is incredibly fast and the API is extensive. This allows the developer to create all sorts of applications including:

• dashboards
• wallets
• block explorers
• payment processors
• much more

This site retrieves Bitcoin Network statistics from a regularly updated, cloud hosted mainnet node.

More development tutorials coming soon!