Gocoin is a full Bitcoin solution written in Go language (golang).
The software architecture is focused on maximum performance of the node and cold storage security of the wallet.
The wallet is designed to be used offline. It is deterministic and password seeded. As long as you remember the password, you do not need any backups ever. Wallet can be used without the client, but with the provided balio tool instead.
The client (p2p node) is an application independent from the wallet. It keeps the entire UTXO set in RAM, providing an instant access to all its records.
System memory and time needed to sync BTC block chain up to the given block number:
The data above is from Gocoin 1.9.6 running on Google Cloud Platform VPS with 32 vCPUs and SSD persistent storage.
For more performance results see gocoin.pl website.
client:
- 64-bit architecture OS and Go compiler.
- File system supporting files larger than 4GB.
- At least 15GB of system RAM.
wallet:
- Any platform that you can make your Go (cross)compiler to build for (Raspberry Pi works).
- For security reasons make sure to use encrypted swap file (if there is a swap file).
- If you decide to store your password in a file, have the disk encrypted (in case it gets stolen).
Having hardware requirements met, any target OS supported by your Go compiler will do. Currently that can be at least one of the following:
- Windows
- Linux
- OS X
- Free BSD
In order to build Gocoin yourself, you will need the following tools installed in your system:
- Go (recent version) - http://golang.org/doc/install
- Git - http://git-scm.com/downloads
If the tools mentioned above are all properly installed, you should be able to execute go and git
from your OS's command prompt without a need to specify full path to the executables.
Use go get to fetch and install the source code files.
go get github.com/piotrnar/gocoin
Note that the source files are stored inside your GOPATH folder. To find out where the GOPATH folder is, execute:
go env GOPATH
Go to the client/ folder and execute go build there.
Go to the wallet/ folder and execute go build there.
Go to the tools/ folder and execute:
go build btcversig.go
Repeat the go build for each source file of the tool you want to build.
Windows or Linux (amd64) binaries can be downloaded from
Please note that the binaries are usually not up to date. I strongly encourage everyone to build the binaries himself.
Although it is an open source project, I am sorry to inform you that I will not merge in any pull requests. The reason is that I want to stay an explicit author of this software, to keep a full control over its licensing. If you are missing some functionality, just describe me your needs and I will see what I can do for you. But if you want your specific code in, please fork and develop your own repo.
The official web page of the project is served at gocoin.pl where you can find extended documentation, including User Manual.
Please do not log github issues when you only have questions concerning this software. Instead see Contact page at gocoin.pl website for possible ways of contacting me.