About Gocoin

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 and - in consequece - an extraordinary blochchain processing performance.

System memory and time Gocoin node needs to sync the blockchain up to the given block number, with comparision to Bitcoin Core 30.2:

The above data was collected using Hetzner dedicated server with Intel i7-7700 CPU, 64GB RAM, 2x512GB SSD and 1Gbit internet connection. Nodes using their default configuration (changed setting in brackets). For other performance charts see gocoin.pl website. Note that results may vary (even by 10-20%), depending on the luck of connecting to 'good' peers.

Requirements

Hardware

client:

• 64-bit architecture OS and Go compiler.
• File system supporting files larger than 4GB.
• At least 32GB 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).

Operating System

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
• macOS
• Free BSD

Build environment

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 (optional) - http://git-scm.com/downloads

If the tools mentioned above are properly installed, you should be able to execute go and (optionally) git from your OS's command prompt without a need to specify full path to the executables.

Getting sources

Download the source code from github to a local folder of your choice by executing:

git clone https://github.com/piotrnar/gocoin.git

Alternatively - if you don't want to use git - download the code archive from github.com/piotrnar/gocoin using any web browser. Then extract the archive to your local disk.

Building

Client node

Go to the client/ folder and execute go build there.

Wallet

Go to the wallet/ folder and execute go build there.

Tools

Each sub-folder inside tools/ folder is a separate tool.

Go to a chosen sub-folder and execute go build there.

Binaries

Find the latest binaries (of client, wallet and balio tool) for Windows, Linux and macOS in Releases.

Older binaries can be downloaded from sourceforge.net.

Note that the binaries are almost never up to date. I strongly encourage everyone to build the binaries themselves.

Development

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.

Support

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.

If you want to support this project, I ask you to run your own Gocoin node, prefably with TCP port 8333 open for the outside world. Do not hestiate to report any issues you find.