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Rust Bitcoin

Library with support for de/serialization, parsing and executing on data-structures and network messages related to Bitcoin.

Documentation

Supports (or should support)

• De/serialization of Bitcoin protocol network messages
• De/serialization of blocks and transactions
• Script de/serialization
• Private keys and address creation, de/serialization and validation (including full BIP32 support)
• PSBT v0 de/serialization and all but the Input Finalizer role. Userust-miniscript to finalize.

For JSONRPC interaction with Bitcoin Core, it is recommended to userust-bitcoincore-rpc.

It is recommended to always usecargo-crev to verify thetrustworthiness of each of your dependencies, including this one.

This librarymust not be used for consensus code (i.e. fully validating blockchain data). Ittechnically supports doing this, but doing so is very ill-advised because there are many deviations,known and unknown, between this library and the Bitcoin Core reference implementation. In aconsensus based cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, it is critical that all parties are using the samerules to validate data, and this library is simply unable to implement the same rules as Core.

Given the complexity of both C++ and Rust, it is unlikely that this will ever be fixed, and thereare no plans to do so. Of course, patches to fix specific consensus incompatibilities are welcome.

16-bit pointer sizes are not supported, and we can't promise they will be. If you care about themplease let us know, so we can know how large the interest is and possibly decide to support them.

We try hard to maintain strict semver compliance with our releases. This codebase includes somepublic functions marked unstable (e.g.,pub fn foo__unstable()). These functions do not adhere tosemver rules; use them at your own discretion.

Currently can be found ondocs.rs/bitcoin. Patches to add usage examplesand to expand on existing docs would be extremely appreciated.

Contributions are generally welcome. If you intend to make larger changes please discuss them in anissue before PRing them to avoid duplicate work and architectural mismatches. If you have anyquestions or ideas you want to discuss, please join us in#bitcoin-rust onlibera.chat.

For more information, please seeCONTRIBUTING.md.

This library should compile with any combination of features onRust 1.63.0.

UseCargo-minimal.lock to build the MSRV by copying toCargo.lock and building.

We integrate with a few external libraries, most notablyserde. Theseare available via feature flags. To ensure compatibility and MSRV stability, weprovide two lock files as a means of inspecting compatible versions:Cargo-minimal.lock containing minimal versions of dependencies andCargo-recent.lock containing recent versions of dependencies tested in our CI.

We do not provide any guarantees about the content of these lock files outsideof "our CI didn't fail with these versions". Specifically, we do not guaranteethat the committed hashes are free from malware. It is your responsibility toreview them.

Rust can be installed using your package manager of choice orrustup.rs. Theformer way is considered more secure since it typically doesn't involve trust in the CA system. Butyou should be aware that the version of Rust shipped by your distribution might be out of date.Generally this isn't a problem forrust-bitcoin since we support much older versions than thecurrent stable one (see MSRV section).

The library can be built and tested usingcargo:

git clone git@github.com:rust-bitcoin/rust-bitcoin.gitcd rust-bitcoincargo build

You can run tests with:

cargo test

Please refer to thecargo documentation for moredetailed instructions.

Thestd cargo feature is enabled by default. To build this project without the Rust standardlibrary, use the--no-default-features flag or setdefault-features = false in your dependencydeclaration when adding it to your project.

For embedded device examples, seebitcoin/embeddedorhashes/embedded.

We supportjust for running dev workflow commands. Runjust fromyour shell to see a list of available sub-commands.

We build docs with the nightly toolchain, you may wish to use the following shell alias to checkyour documentation changes build correctly.

alias build-docs='RUSTDOCFLAGS="--cfg docsrs" cargo +nightly rustdoc --features="$FEATURES" -- -D rustdoc::broken-intra-doc-links'

Unit and integration tests are available for those interested, along with benchmarks. For projectdevelopers, especially new contributors looking for something to work on, we do:

• Fuzz testing withHonggfuzz
• Mutation testing withcargo-mutants
• Code verification withKani

There are always more tests to write and more bugs to find. PRs are extremely welcomed.Please consider testing code as a first-class citizen. We definitely do take PRsimproving and cleaning up test code.

Run as for any other Rust projectcargo test --all-features.

We use a custom Rust compiler configuration conditional to guard the bench mark code. To run thebench marks use:RUSTFLAGS='--cfg=bench' cargo +nightly bench.

We are doing mutation testing withcargo-mutants. To runthese tests first install withcargo install --locked cargo-mutants then run withcargo mutants --in-place --no-shuffle.Note that running these mutation tests will take on the order of 10's of minutes.

We have started usingkani, install withcargo install --locked kani-verifier(no need to runcargo kani setup). Run the tests withcargo kani.

Every PR needs at least two reviews to get merged. During the review phase, maintainers andcontributors are likely to leave comments and request changes. Please try to address them, otherwiseyour PR might get closed without merging after a longer time of inactivity. If your PR isn't readyfor review yet please mark it by prefixing the title withWIP:.

The CI pipeline requires approval before being run on each MR.

In order to speed up the review process the CI pipeline can be run locally usingact. Thefuzz andCross jobs will be skipped when usingactdue to caching being unsupported at this time. We do notactively supportact but will merge PRsfixingact issues.

To assist devs in catching errorsbefore running CI we provide some githooks. Copy the hooks ingithooks/to your githooks folder or runjust githooks-install to copy them all.

Since the altcoin landscape includes projects whichfrequently appear and disappear, and are poorlydesigned anyway we do not support any altcoins.Supporting Bitcoin properly is already difficult enough, and we do not want to increase themaintenance burden and decrease API stability by adding support for other coins.

Our code is public domain so by all means fork it and go wild :)

Release notes are done per crate, see:

• bitcoin CHANGELOG
• addresses CHANGELOG
• base58 CHANGELOG
• hashes CHANGELOG
• internals CHANGELOG
• io CHANGELOG
• primitives CHANGELOG
• units CHANGELOG

The code in this project is licensed under theCreative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal license.We use theSPDX license list andSPDX IDs.