Rust Bitcoin

Library with support for de/serialization, parsing and executing on data-structures and network messages related to Bitcoin.

Documentation

Supports (or should support)

• De/serialization of Bitcoin protocol network messages
• De/serialization of blocks and transactions
• Script de/serialization
• Private keys and address creation, de/serialization and validation (including full BIP-0032 support)
• PSBT v0 de/serialization and all but the Input Finalizer role. Use rust-miniscript to finalize.

For JSONRPC interaction with Bitcoin Core, it is recommended to use rust-bitcoincore-rpc.

It is recommended to always use cargo-crev to verify the trustworthiness of each of your dependencies, including this one.

Known limitations

Consensus

This library must not be used for consensus code (i.e. fully validating blockchain data). It technically supports doing this, but doing so is very ill-advised because there are many deviations, known and unknown, between this library and the Bitcoin Core reference implementation. In a consensus based cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, it is critical that all parties are using the same rules to validate data, and this library is simply unable to implement the same rules as Core.

Given the complexity of both C++ and Rust, it is unlikely that this will ever be fixed, and there are no plans to do so. Of course, patches to fix specific consensus incompatibilities are welcome.

Support for 16-bit pointer sizes

16-bit pointer sizes are not supported, and we can't promise they will be. If you care about them please let us know, so we can know how large the interest is and possibly decide to support them.

Semver compliance

We try hard to maintain strict semver compliance with our releases. This codebase includes some public functions marked unstable (e.g., pub fn foo__unstable()). These functions do not adhere to semver rules; use them at your own discretion.

Documentation

Currently can be found on docs.rs/bitcoin. Patches to add usage examples and to expand on existing docs would be extremely appreciated.

Contributing

Contributions are generally welcome. If you intend to make larger changes please discuss them in an issue before PRing them to avoid duplicate work and architectural mismatches. If you have any questions or ideas you want to discuss, please join us in #bitcoin-rust on libera.chat.

For more information, please see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Minimum Supported Rust Version (MSRV)

This library should compile with any combination of features on Rust 1.74.0.

Use Cargo-minimal.lock to build the MSRV by copying to Cargo.lock and building.

No-std support

The std cargo feature is enabled by default. To build this project without the Rust standard library, use the --no-default-features flag or set default-features = false in your dependency declaration when adding it to your project.

For embedded device examples, see bitcoin/embedded or hashes/embedded.

External dependencies

We integrate with a few external libraries, most notably serde. These are available via feature flags. To ensure compatibility and MSRV stability, we provide two lock files as a means of inspecting compatible versions: Cargo-minimal.lock containing minimal versions of dependencies and Cargo-recent.lock containing recent versions of dependencies tested in our CI.

We do not provide any guarantees about the content of these lock files outside of "our CI didn't fail with these versions". Specifically, we do not guarantee that the committed hashes are free from malware. It is your responsibility to review them.

Policy on Altcoins/Altchains

Since the altcoin landscape includes projects which frequently appear and disappear, and are poorly designed anyway we do not support any altcoins. Supporting Bitcoin properly is already difficult enough, and we do not want to increase the maintenance burden and decrease API stability by adding support for other coins.

Our code is public domain so by all means fork it and go wild :)

Release Notes

Release notes are done per crate, see:

• addresses CHANGELOG
• base58 CHANGELOG
• bip158 CHANGELOG
• bitcoin CHANGELOG
• chacha20_poly1305 CHANGELOG
• consensus_encoding CHANGELOG
• crypto CHANGELOG
• hashes CHANGELOG
• internals CHANGELOG
• io CHANGELOG
• p2p CHANGELOG
• primitives CHANGELOG
• units CHANGELOG

Licensing

The code in this project is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal license. We use the SPDX license list and SPDX IDs.