Ethereum ProgPoW

Ethereum ProgPoW, an ethereum node client created for miners and decentralized network

What is Ethereum ProgPoW?

Ethereum ProgPoW is an alternative ethereum node software to provide miner’s voting tool for secure, decentralized network against potential ASIC threat. By adopting ProgPoW, a Programmatic Proof-of-Work extension for Ethash algorithm, Ethereum ProgPoW can fulfill its vision to support sustainable, scalable network operation under transparent open source development.

Building the source

Building geth requires both a Go (version 1.9 or later) and a C compiler. (For ubuntu install build-essential and golang-1.10-go from apt package manager) You can install them using your favourite package manager. Once the dependencies are installed, run

make geth

or, to build the full suite of utilities:

make all

Executables

The ethereumprogpow project comes with several wrappers/executables found in the cmd directory.

Command

Description

geth

Our main Ethereum CLI client. It is the entry point into the Ethereum network (main-, test- or private net), capable of running as a full node (default), archive node (retaining all historical state) or a light node (retrieving data live). It can be used by other processes as a gateway into the Ethereum network via JSON RPC endpoints exposed on top of HTTP, WebSocket and/or IPC transports. geth --help and the CLI Wiki page for command line options.

Running geth

Going through all the possible command line flags is out of scope here (please consult our CLI Wiki page), but we've enumerated a few common parameter combos to get you up to speed quickly on how you can run your own Geth instance.

Full node on the main Ethereum (ProgPoW) network

By far the most common scenario is people wanting to simply interact with the Ethereum network: create accounts; transfer funds; deploy and interact with contracts. For this particular use-case the user doesn't care about years-old historical data, so we can fast-sync quickly to the current state of the network. To do so:

$ geth

This command will:

• Start geth in fast sync mode (default, can be changed with the --syncmode flag), causing it to download more data in exchange for avoiding processing the entire history of the Ethereum network, which is very CPU intensive.
• Start up Geth's built-in interactive JavaScript console, (via the trailing console subcommand) through which you can invoke all official web3 methods as well as Geth's own management APIs. This tool is optional and if you leave it out you can always attach to an already running Geth instance with geth attach.

Full node on the Gangnam ProgPoW test network

Transitioning towards developers, if you'd like to play around with creating Ethereum contracts, you almost certainly would like to do that without any real money involved until you get the hang of the entire system. In other words, instead of attaching to the main network, you want to join the test network with your node, which is fully equivalent to the main network, but with play-Ether only.

$ geth --gangnam

The console subcommand have the exact same meaning as above and they are equally useful on the testnet too. Please see above for their explanations if you've skipped to here.

Specifying the --testnet flag however will reconfigure your Geth instance a bit:

• Instead of using the default data directory (~/.ethereum on Linux for example), Geth will nest itself one level deeper into a testnet subfolder (~/.ethereum/testnet on Linux). Note, on OSX and Linux this also means that attaching to a running testnet node requires the use of a custom endpoint since geth attach will try to attach to a production node endpoint by default. E.g. geth attach <datadir>/testnet/geth.ipc. Windows users are not affected by this.
• Instead of connecting the main Ethereum network, the client will connect to the test network, which uses different P2P bootnodes, different network IDs and genesis states.

Note: Although there are some internal protective measures to prevent transactions from crossing over between the main network and test network, you should make sure to always use separate accounts for play-money and real-money. Unless you manually move accounts, Geth will by default correctly separate the two networks and will not make any accounts available between them.

Configuration

As an alternative to passing the numerous flags to the geth binary, you can also pass a configuration file via:

$ geth --config /path/to/your_config.toml

To get an idea how the file should look like you can use the dumpconfig subcommand to export your existing configuration:

$ geth --your-favourite-flags dumpconfig

Note: This works only with geth v1.6.0 and above.

Docker quick start

One of the quickest ways to get Ethereum up and running on your machine is by using Docker:

docker run -d --name ethereum-node -v /Users/alice/ethereumprogpow:/root \
           -p 8545:8545 -p 30303:30303 \
           ethereumprogpow/ethereumprogpow

This will start geth in fast-sync mode with a DB memory allowance of 1GB just as the above command does. It will also create a persistent volume in your home directory for saving your blockchain as well as map the default ports. There is also an alpine tag available for a slim version of the image.

Do not forget --rpcaddr 0.0.0.0, if you want to access RPC from other containers and/or hosts. By default, geth binds to the local interface and RPC endpoints is not accessible from the outside.

Programatically interfacing Geth nodes

As a developer, sooner rather than later you'll want to start interacting with Geth and the Ethereum network via your own programs and not manually through the console. To aid this, Geth has built-in support for a JSON-RPC based APIs (standard APIs and Geth specific APIs). These can be exposed via HTTP, WebSockets and IPC (unix sockets on unix based platforms, and named pipes on Windows).

The IPC interface is enabled by default and exposes all the APIs supported by Geth, whereas the HTTP and WS interfaces need to manually be enabled and only expose a subset of APIs due to security reasons. These can be turned on/off and configured as you'd expect.

HTTP based JSON-RPC API options:

• --rpc Enable the HTTP-RPC server
• --rpcaddr HTTP-RPC server listening interface (default: "localhost")
• --rpcport HTTP-RPC server listening port (default: 8545)
• --rpcapi API's offered over the HTTP-RPC interface (default: "eth,net,web3")
• --rpccorsdomain Comma separated list of domains from which to accept cross origin requests (browser enforced)
• --ws Enable the WS-RPC server
• --wsaddr WS-RPC server listening interface (default: "localhost")
• --wsport WS-RPC server listening port (default: 8546)
• --wsapi API's offered over the WS-RPC interface (default: "eth,net,web3")
• --wsorigins Origins from which to accept websockets requests
• --ipcdisable Disable the IPC-RPC server
• --ipcapi API's offered over the IPC-RPC interface (default: "admin,debug,eth,miner,net,personal,shh,txpool,web3")
• --ipcpath Filename for IPC socket/pipe within the datadir (explicit paths escape it)

You'll need to use your own programming environments' capabilities (libraries, tools, etc) to connect via HTTP, WS or IPC to a Geth node configured with the above flags and you'll need to speak JSON-RPC on all transports. You can reuse the same connection for multiple requests!

Note: Please understand the security implications of opening up an HTTP/WS based transport before doing so! Hackers on the internet are actively trying to subvert Ethereum nodes with exposed APIs! Further, all browser tabs can access locally running webservers, so malicious webpages could try to subvert locally available APIs!

Development Process

This Github repository contains the source code of releases.

At the early stage in Ethereum ProgPoW's development, we won't often make changes and updates to our codebase as an effort to serve our client as stable as possible.

We expect this to change in the future.

Contacting the Ethereum ProgPoW Code maintainers

If you want to report a non-confidential issue with Ethereum ProgPoW, please use the GitHub issue system.

If you want to report a security vulnerability, please send an e-mail to [email protected].

For any other questions or issues, please send e-mail to [email protected].

License

The ethereumprogpow library (i.e. all code outside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING.LESSER file.

The ethereumprogpow binaries (i.e. all code inside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING file.