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BEAMCoin - a simple bitcoin style blockchain in less than 500 lines of code

BEAMCoin is a very simple multi-party blockchain using Nakamoto consensus. It exists primarily as a libp2p sample application and hopefully as an accessible implementation people can explore to learn more about how blockchains work.

Please note that this is not production grade. Many integrity checks and security measures found in real blockchains are not present because of the complexity and size they'd add.

What can it do?

BEAMCoin blocks can only hold 2 transaction types: coinbase transactions (to pay the miner for mining) and payment transactions. Transaction fees are not implemented.

BEAMCoin nodes communicate via the internet using the libp2p library. As libp2p gains features for traversing more complicated networks BEAMCoin will inherit those capabilities. Currently only simple topologies will work.

How to build it

Run make.

If you want to run some checks; run make check.

How to use it

To generate a genesis block for a BEAMCoin blockchain you need to use the genesis command:

$ ./genesis.sh satoshi

This will start a node called [email protected], create a genesis block it will write to a file called [email protected]. You can now query the state of the node with the status command:

$ ./status satoshi

You'll see something like this:

Blockchain is of height 1 with head 2e71d9499f1a8cf883c6c2e970224aadfafa07f35fdc54ccc2a7c75572000000
Listen addresses are ["/ip4/192.168.11.137/tcp/38019"]
Miner address is 12r8dFpB28Ry6UeE31XKgfPdY9JmFUpXKGXrfN4FViwP1oGyhgN
Ledger
12r8dFpB28Ry6UeE31XKgfPdY9JmFUpXKGXrfN4FViwP1oGyhgN has 4035 with nonce 0

So from this we can see the blockchain only has 2 blocks in it, and the satoshi miner has claimed 2 mining rewards.

Now we have a genesis block, we can invite other miners to the party:

$ ./join.sh vitalik [email protected] /ip4/192.168.11.137/tcp/38019

We started a node called vitalik and gave it a copy of the genesis block and the multiaddr that satoshi is running on.

Let's add a third miner:

$ ./join.sh come-from-beyond [email protected] /ip4/192.168.11.137/tcp/38019

$ ./status.sh satoshi
Blockchain is of height 19 with head 69c990ef0df3296c085ee32b7d6fb1e7246fe0a9b0fafd5474c69184d6000000
Listen addresses are ["/ip4/192.168.11.137/tcp/38019"]
Miner address is 12r8dFpB28Ry6UeE31XKgfPdY9JmFUpXKGXrfN4FViwP1oGyhgN
Ledger
12qKXB8UiHfBNhTFCNkWZyiytptZBsFuyeL7LDc1w68PEt9rkBP has 20117 with nonce 0
12r8dFpB28Ry6UeE31XKgfPdY9JmFUpXKGXrfN4FViwP1oGyhgN has 14050 with nonce 0
12rcbanTv8nVgan2dzqbn39MNj6k4cBfkfhvacC9g4Xcn77JSv1 has 6003 with nonce 0

$ ./status.sh vitalik
Blockchain is of height 19 with head 69c990ef0df3296c085ee32b7d6fb1e7246fe0a9b0fafd5474c69184d6000000
Listen addresses are ["/ip4/192.168.11.137/tcp/34757"]
Miner address is 12qKXB8UiHfBNhTFCNkWZyiytptZBsFuyeL7LDc1w68PEt9rkBP
Ledger
12qKXB8UiHfBNhTFCNkWZyiytptZBsFuyeL7LDc1w68PEt9rkBP has 20117 with nonce 0
12r8dFpB28Ry6UeE31XKgfPdY9JmFUpXKGXrfN4FViwP1oGyhgN has 14050 with nonce 0
12rcbanTv8nVgan2dzqbn39MNj6k4cBfkfhvacC9g4Xcn77JSv1 has 6003 with nonce 0

$ ./status.sh come-from-beyond
Blockchain is of height 19 with head 69c990ef0df3296c085ee32b7d6fb1e7246fe0a9b0fafd5474c69184d6000000
Listen addresses are ["/ip4/192.168.11.137/tcp/45277"]
Miner address is 12rcbanTv8nVgan2dzqbn39MNj6k4cBfkfhvacC9g4Xcn77JSv1
Ledger
12qKXB8UiHfBNhTFCNkWZyiytptZBsFuyeL7LDc1w68PEt9rkBP has 20117 with nonce 0
12r8dFpB28Ry6UeE31XKgfPdY9JmFUpXKGXrfN4FViwP1oGyhgN has 14050 with nonce 0
12rcbanTv8nVgan2dzqbn39MNj6k4cBfkfhvacC9g4Xcn77JSv1 has 6003 with nonce 0

So we can see the 3 miners have arrived at consensus (it can take a while). They all have the same ledger values and all agree on the height of the blockchain and the hash of the newest block.

Now, satoshi has quite a lot more money than come-from-beyond, let's send some money around:

$ ./spend.sh satoshi 1337 12rcbanTv8nVgan2dzqbn39MNj6k4cBfkfhvacC9g4Xcn77JSv1
Transaction <<"g2gGZAALcGF5bWVudF90eG5tAAAAIPNBTlpaQkGZW8/RtO5m3lvOev/IU3pYYdDXNNcheqEnbQAAACD0WaJ07I+IT4Tr3KX0T7YVL9U+tm9GNVvP90DbKDsNq2IAAAU5YQFtAAAASDBGAiEAmzeJ9bHFGylaq9/V9JYzD57X7Jtu/b779VaqkkR7VckCIQDNHvmIZKc1dn0sr4vomSGzBy6/Z7Sp5lMm2PXw5AtS7A==">> submitted

Now we have to wait a bit for it to clear. BEAMCoin doesn't gossip transactions (yet), so we have to wait for satoshi to mine a winning block...

Eventually we see it's happened:

$ ./status.sh satoshi
Blockchain is of height 44 with head 61953521fa69c8146c02d2cbb62a302c15e9caa28de803174baac7b809000000
Listen addresses are ["/ip4/192.168.11.137/tcp/38019"]
Miner address is 12r8dFpB28Ry6UeE31XKgfPdY9JmFUpXKGXrfN4FViwP1oGyhgN
Ledger
12qKXB8UiHfBNhTFCNkWZyiytptZBsFuyeL7LDc1w68PEt9rkBP has 43952 with nonce 0
12r8dFpB28Ry6UeE31XKgfPdY9JmFUpXKGXrfN4FViwP1oGyhgN has 28605 with nonce 1
12rcbanTv8nVgan2dzqbn39MNj6k4cBfkfhvacC9g4Xcn77JSv1 has 17263 with nonce 0

We can see that satoshi's nonce has increased and some funds have moved around.

This is about all BEAMCoin can do, but hopefully it explains some of the ideas behind blockchains and how they work.

Limitations

There are a lot:

  • Don't inject invalid transactions because right now they never get removed from the mempool and so will contaminate all subsequent blocks you try to mine.
  • Nodes will discover each other over libp2p, but they don't yet establish redundant connections. If you stop the node everyone is connected to, the blockchain will fork.
  • Blocks are not stored on disk, eventually you'll run out of memory
  • Lots more...