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github.com/decred/dcrd/blockchain/v2

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    github.com/decred/dcrd/blockchain/v2

Package blockchain implements Decred block handling and chain selection rules. The Decred block handling and chain selection rules are an integral, and quite likely the most important, part of decred. At its core, Decred is a distributed consensus of which blocks are valid and which ones will comprise the main block chain (public ledger) that ultimately determines accepted transactions, so it is extremely important that fully validating nodes agree on all rules. At a high level, this package provides support for inserting new blocks into the block chain according to the aforementioned rules. It includes functionality such as rejecting duplicate blocks, ensuring blocks and transactions follow all rules, orphan handling, and best chain selection along with reorganization. Since this package does not deal with other Decred specifics such as network communication or wallets, it provides a notification system which gives the caller a high level of flexibility in how they want to react to certain events such as orphan blocks which need their parents requested and newly connected main chain blocks which might result in wallet updates. Before a block is allowed into the block chain, it must go through an intensive series of validation rules. The following list serves as a general outline of those rules to provide some intuition into what is going on under the hood, but is by no means exhaustive: Errors returned by this package are either the raw errors provided by underlying calls or of type blockchain.RuleError. This allows the caller to differentiate between unexpected errors, such as database errors, versus errors due to rule violations through type assertions. In addition, callers can programmatically determine the specific rule violation by examining the ErrorCode field of the type asserted blockchain.RuleError.


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blockchain

Build Status ISC License GoDoc

Package blockchain implements Decred block handling and chain selection rules. The test coverage is currently only around 60%, but will be increasing over time. See test_coverage.txt for the gocov coverage report. Alternatively, if you are running a POSIX OS, you can run the cov_report.sh script for a real-time report. Package blockchain is licensed under the liberal ISC license.

There is an associated blog post about the release of this package here.

This package has intentionally been designed so it can be used as a standalone package for any projects needing to handle processing of blocks into the decred block chain.

Installation and Updating

$ go get -u github.com/decred/dcrd/blockchain

Decred Chain Processing Overview

Before a block is allowed into the block chain, it must go through an intensive series of validation rules. The following list serves as a general outline of those rules to provide some intuition into what is going on under the hood, but is by no means exhaustive:

  • Reject duplicate blocks
  • Perform a series of sanity checks on the block and its transactions such as verifying proof of work, timestamps, number and character of transactions, transaction amounts, script complexity, and merkle root calculations
  • Compare the block against predetermined checkpoints for expected timestamps and difficulty based on elapsed time since the checkpoint
  • Save the most recent orphan blocks for a limited time in case their parent blocks become available
  • Stop processing if the block is an orphan as the rest of the processing depends on the block's position within the block chain
  • Perform a series of more thorough checks that depend on the block's position within the block chain such as verifying block difficulties adhere to difficulty retarget rules, timestamps are after the median of the last several blocks, all transactions are finalized, checkpoint blocks match, and block versions are in line with the previous blocks
  • Determine how the block fits into the chain and perform different actions accordingly in order to ensure any side chains which have higher difficulty than the main chain become the new main chain
  • When a block is being connected to the main chain (either through reorganization of a side chain to the main chain or just extending the main chain), perform further checks on the block's transactions such as verifying transaction duplicates, script complexity for the combination of connected scripts, coinbase maturity, double spends, and connected transaction values
  • Run the transaction scripts to verify the spender is allowed to spend the coins
  • Insert the block into the block database

Examples

  • ProcessBlock Example Demonstrates how to create a new chain instance and use ProcessBlock to attempt to add a block to the chain. This example intentionally attempts to insert a duplicate genesis block to illustrate how an invalid block is handled.

License

Package blockchain is licensed under the copyfree ISC License.

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Last updated on 10 Jun 2023

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