Core is an evolution of the Geth codebase. We leveraged the improvements made by the BSC team to add greater throughput and cheaper transactions by way of hard fork. Nevertheless, we differ from BSC in many ways. One preeminent difference is that Core is based on Satoshi Plus Consensus which relies on Proof of Work (PoW) alongside Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS). With these modifications, we’re able to remain decentralized without the performance tradeoffs seen in traditional PoW consensus systems. Additionally, with our hybrid score based off of both delegated Bitcoin hash power and delegated stake, we’ve created a fluid market for validators and rewards that anyone can participate in.

More details in White Paper.

Satoshi Plus consensus combines both Proof of Work (PoW) and Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) to leverage the strengths of each while simultaneously ameliorating their respective shortcomings. Specifically, we leverage Bitcoin’s decentralized computing power, DPoS and unique validator election mechanisms to ensure scalability, and the resulting, multifaceted network’s security.

To achieve the cross-chain communication from Bitcoin Network to Core chain, we introduced an on-chain light client verification algorithm. It contains two parts:

1. Stateless precompiled contract to do bitcoin header verification, coinbase transaction verification and Merkle Proof verification.
2. Stateful solidity contract to store bitcoin block hashes and headers.

Many of the below are the same as or similar to go-ethereum.

For prerequisites and detailed build instructions please read the Installation Instructions.

Building geth requires both a Go (version 1.14 or later) and a C compiler. 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

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

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.

The hardware must meet certain requirements to run a full node. Please check How to run a core fullnode.

$ geth console

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 Core chain network, which is very CPU intensive.
• Start up geth's built-in interactive JavaScript console, (via the trailing console subcommand) through which you can interact using web3 methods (note: the web3 version bundled within geth is very old, and not up to date with official docs), 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.

Steps:

1. Download the binary, config and genesis files from latest release, or compile the binary by make geth.
2. Init genesis state: ./geth --datadir node init genesis.json.
3. Start your fullnode: ./geth --config ./config.toml --datadir ./node.
4. Or start a validator node: ./geth --config ./config.toml --datadir ./node -unlock ${validatorAddr} --mine --allow-insecure-unlock. The ${validatorAddr} is the wallet account address of your running validator node.

More details about running a node and becoming a validator.

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.

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

As a developer, sooner rather than later you'll want to start interacting with geth and the Core chain 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:

• --http Enable the HTTP-RPC server
• --http.addr HTTP-RPC server listening interface (default: localhost)
• --http.port HTTP-RPC server listening port (default: 8575)
• --http.api API's offered over the HTTP-RPC interface (default: eth,net,web3)
• --http.corsdomain Comma separated list of domains from which to accept cross origin requests (browser enforced)
• --ws Enable the WS-RPC server
• --ws.addr WS-RPC server listening interface (default: localhost)
• --ws.port WS-RPC server listening port (default: 8576)
• --ws.api API's offered over the WS-RPC interface (default: eth,net,web3)
• --ws.origins 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 Core chain nodes with exposed APIs! Further, all browser tabs can access locally running web servers, so malicious web pages could try to subvert locally available APIs!

Thank you for considering to help out with the source code! We welcome contributions from anyone on the internet, and are grateful for even the smallest of fixes!

If you'd like to contribute to Core, please fork, fix, commit and send a pull request for the maintainers to review and merge into the main code base. If you wish to submit more complex changes though, please check up with the core devs first on our discord channel to ensure those changes are in line with the general philosophy of the project and/or get some early feedback which can make both your efforts much lighter as well as our review and merge procedures quick and simple.

Please make sure your contributions adhere to our coding guidelines:

• Code must adhere to the official Go formatting guidelines (i.e. uses gofmt).
• Code must be documented adhering to the official Go commentary guidelines.
• Pull requests need to be based on and opened against the master branch.
• Commit messages should be prefixed with the package(s) they modify.
  • E.g. "eth, rpc: make trace configs optional"

Please see the Developers' Guide for more details on configuring your environment, managing project dependencies, and testing procedures.

The core 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 core 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.