BTCRuby

BTCRuby aims at clarity, security and flexibility. The API is designed simultenously with CoreBitcoin (Objective-C library) and polished on real-life applications.

Documentation and Examples

Please see BTCRuby Reference for API documentation and examples.

Basic Features

• Encoding/decoding of addresses, WIF private keys (BTC::Address).
• APIs to construct and inspect blocks, transactions and scripts.
• Native BIP32 and BIP44 ("HW Wallets") support (see BTC::Keychain).
• Explicit APIs to handle compressed and uncompressed public keys.
• Explicit APIs to handle mainnet/testnet (see BTC::Network)
• Consistent API for data encoding used throughout the library itself (see BTC::Data and BTC::WireFormat).
• Flexible transaction builder that can work with arbitrary data sources that provide unspent outputs.
• Handy extensions on built-in classes (e.g. String#to_hex) are optional (see extensions.rb).
• Optional attributes on Transaction, TransactionOutput and TransactionInput to hold additional data provided by 3rd party APIs.

Advanced Features

• ECDSA signatures are deterministic and normalized according to RFC6979 and BIP62.
• Automatic normalization of existing ECDSA signatures (see BTC::Key#normalized_signature).
• Rich script analysis and compositing support (see BTC::Script).
• Full script interpreter with P2SH and CLTV features.
• Powerful diagnostics API covering the entire library (see BTC::Diagnostics).
• Canonicality checks for transactions, public keys and script elements.
• Fee computation and signature script simulation for building transactions without signing them.
• Complete OpenAssets implementation: validating OpenAssets transactions, easy to use transaction builder, API for handling Asset Definition.

Philosophy

• We use clear, expressive names for all methods and classes.
• Self-contained implementation. Only external dependency is ffi gem that helps linking directly with OpenSSL and libsecp256k1.
• For efficiency and consistency we use binary strings throughout the library (not the hex strings as in other libraries).
• We do not pollute standard classes with our methods. To use utility extensions like String#to_hex you should explicitly require 'btcruby/extensions'.
• We use OpenSSL BIGNUM implementation where compatibility is critical (instead of the built-in Ruby Bignum).
• We enforces canonical and determinstic ECDSA signatures for maximum compatibility and security using native OpenSSL functions.
• We treat endianness explicitly. Even though most systems are little-endian, it never hurts to show where endianness is important.

The goal is to provide a complete Bitcoin toolkit in Ruby.

How to run tests

$ bundle install
$ brew install ./vendor/homebrew/secp256k1.rb
$ rake

How to publish a gem

1. Edit version.rb to bump the version.
2. Update RELEASE_NOTES.md.
3. Commit changes and tag it with new version.
4. Generate and publish the gem:

$ git tag VERSION
$ git push origin --tags
$ gem build btcruby.gemspec
$ gem push btcruby-VERSION.gem

Authors

• Oleg Andreev
• Ryan Smith