Casco

Bitcoin application development toolkit

WARNING

This repository contains alpha software and is in heavy development. Do not use this for mission critical applications.

Introduction

With Casco you can process Bitcoin transactions as if you were writing a web server application. Developers familiar with ExpressJS or Connect will feel right at home. Take a look at this example:

const app = casco();

app.use((req, res) => {
    console.log(`New Transaction! Hash: ${req.tx.tx.h}`);
});

app.listen('bit://1Ks6qfewg1xovgZsJFkkgQdcyFzNeH7Pv5');

The above application will listen to all transactions with 1Ks6qfewg1xovgZsJFkkgQdcyFzNeH7Pv5 as the Bitcom protocol id.

Install

Quick install

npm install -g yo generator-casco
yo casco

The command yo casco will prompt you with the choice of generating a new example project or an empty project.

We recommend new users to use the Getting Started Guide as it provides a step by step tutorial on beginning to use the application framework with a statemachine example.

Usually 2 clients will be generated in your project, named client-ADDRESS.js, where ADDRESS is a Bitcoin address. The asssociated public and private keys can be found in the .env* files.

To fund a client, simply run node client-<ADDRESS>.js. A QR code will be displayed to which you can send funds. Use the client to send transactions to interact with the application in index.js.

If your project has previously saved a state to the blockchain - it will resync with the blockchain to reach the last known state.

Funding a project's client

Usually 2 clients are created by default. To fund a client so it can begin sending transactions, navigate to the project directory and run:

node client-<ADDRESS>.js

where ADDRESS is the client's generated address.

This will print a usage message, your client's address and a corresponding QR code.

You can always get your satoshis back from a client using

node client-<ADDRESS>.js --refund <WITHDRAWALADDRESS>

where ADDRESS is the client's address. And WITHDRAWALADDRESS is the address you want to receive the coins on.

Creating a new client

If you need an extra client, you can create one using the menu accessed by running

yo casco

or directly with:

yo casco:client

Middleware

Casco comes standard with a few useful middleware functions, please check out the statemachine example on their usage. Also check out the annotated sourcecode of the middleware in packages/casco/lib/middleware

Future improvements

• Support for Bitcom protocol prefix registration
• Built-in key management
• Advanced transaction builder
• Integrating syncstate into the framework (it's possible at the moment with custom middleware)
• Improving the syncing algorithm
• Support for handling block and reorg events
• Support for custom sync algorithms
• Support for subrouters
• Support for syncing with a full node in addition to BitDB
• Support for syncing with BitBus in addition to BitDB