Bitcoin API

Package dcrrpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Decred JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Decred RPC server that uses a mostly btcd/bitcoin core style Decred JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with dcrd (https://github.com/decred/dcrd) and dcrwallet (https://github.com/decred/dcrwallet). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, dcrd and dcrwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to dcrd or dcrwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by dcrd and dcrwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by dcrd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by dcrd (and dcrwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that dcrd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named dcrwallet. This means if you are connected to the dcrd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, dcrwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *dcrjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package gobcy implements a wrapper for the http://www.blockcypher.com API. You can use it to interact with addresses, transactions, and blocks from various blockchains, including Bitcoin's main and test3 chains, and the BlockCypher test chain. Please note: we assume you use are using a 64-bit architecture for deployment, which automatically makes `int` types 64-bit. Without 64-bit ints, some values might overflow on certain calls, depending on the blockchain you are querying. If you are using a 32-bit system, you can change all `int` types to `int64` to explicitly work around this issue.

Package dcrjson provides primitives for working with the Decred JSON-RPC API. When communicating via the JSON-RPC protocol, all of the commands need to be marshalled to and from the the wire in the appropriate format. This package provides data structures and primitives to ease this process. In addition, it also provides some additional features such as custom command registration, command categorization, and reflection-based help generation. This information is not necessary in order to use this package, but it does provide some intuition into what the marshalling and unmarshalling that is discussed below is doing under the hood. As defined by the JSON-RPC spec, there are effectively two forms of messages on the wire: Request Objects {"jsonrpc":"1.0","id":"SOMEID","method":"SOMEMETHOD","params":[SOMEPARAMS]} NOTE: Notifications are the same format except the id field is null. Response Objects {"result":SOMETHING,"error":null,"id":"SOMEID"} {"result":null,"error":{"code":SOMEINT,"message":SOMESTRING},"id":"SOMEID"} For requests, the params field can vary in what it contains depending on the method (a.k.a. command) being sent. Each parameter can be as simple as an int or a complex structure containing many nested fields. The id field is used to identify a request and will be included in the associated response. When working with asynchronous transports, such as websockets, spontaneous notifications are also possible. As indicated, they are the same as a request object, except they have the id field set to null. Therefore, servers will ignore requests with the id field set to null, while clients can choose to consume or ignore them. Unfortunately, the original Bitcoin JSON-RPC API (and hence anything compatible with it) doesn't always follow the spec and will sometimes return an error string in the result field with a null error for certain commands. However, for the most part, the error field will be set as described on failure. Based upon the discussion above, it should be easy to see how the types of this package map into the required parts of the protocol To simplify the marshalling of the requests and responses, the MarshalCmd and MarshalResponse functions are provided. They return the raw bytes ready to be sent across the wire. Unmarshalling a received Request object is a two step process: This approach is used since it provides the caller with access to the additional fields in the request that are not part of the command such as the ID. Unmarshalling a received Response object is also a two step process: As above, this approach is used since it provides the caller with access to the fields in the response such as the ID and Error. This package provides two approaches for creating a new command. This first, and preferred, method is to use one of the New<Foo>Cmd functions. This allows static compile-time checking to help ensure the parameters stay in sync with the struct definitions. The second approach is the NewCmd function which takes a method (command) name and variable arguments. The function includes full checking to ensure the parameters are accurate according to provided method, however these checks are, obviously, run-time which means any mistakes won't be found until the code is actually executed. However, it is quite useful for user-supplied commands that are intentionally dynamic. The command handling of this package is built around the concept of registered commands. This is true for the wide variety of commands already provided by the package, but it also means caller can easily provide custom commands with all of the same functionality as the built-in commands. Use the RegisterCmd function for this purpose. A list of all registered methods can be obtained with the RegisteredCmdMethods function. All registered commands are registered with flags that identify information such as whether the command applies to a chain server, wallet server, or is a notification along with the method name to use. These flags can be obtained with the MethodUsageFlags flags, and the method can be obtained with the CmdMethod function. To facilitate providing consistent help to users of the RPC server, this package exposes the GenerateHelp and function which uses reflection on registered commands or notifications, as well as the provided expected result types, to generate the final help text. In addition, the MethodUsageText function is provided to generate consistent one-line usage for registered commands and notifications using reflection. There are 2 distinct type of errors supported by this package: The first category of errors (type Error) typically indicates a programmer error and can be avoided by properly using the API. Errors of this type will be returned from the various functions available in this package. They identify issues such as unsupported field types, attempts to register malformed commands, and attempting to create a new command with an improper number of parameters. The specific reason for the error can be detected by type asserting it to a *dcrjson.Error and accessing the ErrorCode field. The second category of errors (type RPCError), on the other hand, are useful for returning errors to RPC clients. Consequently, they are used in the previously described Response type. This example demonstrates how to unmarshal a JSON-RPC response and then unmarshal the result field in the response to a concrete type.

Package mcxjson provides infrastructure for working with MultiCash JSON-RPC APIs. When communicating via the JSON-RPC protocol, all requests and responses must be marshalled to and from the wire in the appropriate format. This package provides infrastructure and primitives to ease this process. This information is not necessary in order to use this package, but it does provide some intuition into what the marshalling and unmarshalling that is discussed below is doing under the hood. As defined by the JSON-RPC spec, there are effectively two forms of messages on the wire: Request Objects {"jsonrpc":"1.0","id":"SOMEID","method":"SOMEMETHOD","params":[SOMEPARAMS]} NOTE: Notifications are the same format except the id field is null. Response Objects {"result":SOMETHING,"error":null,"id":"SOMEID"} {"result":null,"error":{"code":SOMEINT,"message":SOMESTRING},"id":"SOMEID"} For requests, the params field can vary in what it contains depending on the method (a.k.a. command) being sent. Each parameter can be as simple as an int or a complex structure containing many nested fields. The id field is used to identify a request and will be included in the associated response. When working with streamed RPC transports, such as websockets, spontaneous notifications are also possible. As indicated, they are the same as a request object, except they have the id field set to null. Therefore, servers will ignore requests with the id field set to null, while clients can choose to consume or ignore them. Unfortunately, the original Bitcoin JSON-RPC API (and hence anything compatible with it) doesn't always follow the spec and will sometimes return an error string in the result field with a null error for certain commands. However, for the most part, the error field will be set as described on failure. To simplify the marshalling of the requests and responses, the MarshalCmd and MarshalResponse functions are provided. They return the raw bytes ready to be sent across the wire. Unmarshalling a received Request object is a two step process: This approach is used since it provides the caller with access to the additional fields in the request that are not part of the command such as the ID. Unmarshalling a received Response object is also a two step process: As above, this approach is used since it provides the caller with access to the fields in the response such as the ID and Error. This package provides the NewCmd function which takes a method (command) name and variable arguments. The function includes full checking to ensure the parameters are accurate according to provided method, however these checks are, obviously, run-time which means any mistakes won't be found until the code is actually executed. However, it is quite useful for user-supplied commands that are intentionally dynamic. External packages can and should implement types implementing Command for use with MarshalCmd/ParseParams. The command handling of this package is built around the concept of registered commands. This is true for the wide variety of commands already provided by the package, but it also means caller can easily provide custom commands with all of the same functionality as the built-in commands. Use the RegisterCmd function for this purpose. A list of all registered methods can be obtained with the RegisteredCmdMethods function. All registered commands are registered with flags that identify information such as whether the command applies to a chain server, wallet server, or is a notification along with the method name to use. These flags can be obtained with the MethodUsageFlags flags, and the method can be obtained with the CmdMethod function. To facilitate providing consistent help to users of the RPC server, this package exposes the GenerateHelp and function which uses reflection on registered commands or notifications to generate the final help text. In addition, the MethodUsageText function is provided to generate consistent one-line usage for registered commands and notifications using reflection. There are 2 distinct type of errors supported by this package: The first category of errors (type Error) typically indicates a programmer error and can be avoided by properly using the API. Errors of this type will be returned from the various functions available in this package. They identify issues such as unsupported field types, attempts to register malformed commands, and attempting to create a new command with an improper number of parameters. The specific reason for the error can be detected by type asserting it to a *mcxjson.Error and accessing the ErrorKind field. The second category of errors (type RPCError), on the other hand, are useful for returning errors to RPC clients. Consequently, they are used in the previously described Response type. This example demonstrates how to unmarshal a JSON-RPC response and then unmarshal the result field in the response to a concrete type.

Package flojson implements the Florincoin JSON-RPC API. This is a fork of btcjson by Conformal. Package flojson and btcjson are licensed under the liberal ISC license. The original package btcjson is one of the core packages from btcd, an alternative full-node implementation of bitcoin which is under active development by Conformal. Although it was primarily written for btcd, this package has intentionally been designed so it can be used as a standalone package for any projects needing to communicate with a bitcoin client using the json rpc interface. This package provides data structures and code for marshalling and unmarshalling json for communicating with a running instance of flod or florincoind/florincoin-qt. It also provides code for sending those messages. It does not provide any code for the client to actually deal with the messages. Although it is meant primarily for btcd, it is possible to use this code elsewhere for interacting with a bitcoin client programatically. All messages to bitcoin are of the form: The params field can vary in what it contains depending on the different method (or command) being sent. Replies will vary in form for the different commands. The basic form is: The result field can be as simple as an int, or a complex structure containing many nested fields. For cases where we have already worked out the possible types of reply, result is unmarshalled into a structure that matches the command. For others, an interface is returned. An interface is not as convenient as one needs to do a type assertion first before using the value, but it means we can handle arbitrary replies. The error field is null when there is no error. When there is an error it will return a numeric error code as well as a message describing the error. id is simply the id of the requester. All RPC calls must be authenticated with a username and password. The specifics on how to configure the RPC server varies depending on the specific bitcoin implementation. For bitcoind, this is accomplished by setting rpcuser and rpcpassword in the file ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf. For btcd, this is accomplished by setting rpcuser and rpcpass in the file ~/.btcd/btcd.conf. The default local address of bitcoind is 127.0.0.1:8332 and the default local address of btcd is 127.0.0.1:8334 The general pattern to use this package consists of generating a message (see the full list on the official bitcoin wiki), sending the message, and handling the result after asserting its type. For commands where the reply structure is known, such as getinfo, one can directly access the fields in the Reply structure by type asserting the reply to the appropriate concrete type. For other commands where this package does not yet provide a concrete implementation for the reply, such as getrawmempool, the reply uses a generic interface so one can access individual items as follows:

Package btcjson implements the bitcoin JSON-RPC API. A complete description of the JSON-RPC protocol as used by bitcoin can be found on the official wiki at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/API_reference_%28JSON-RPC%29 with a list of all the supported calls at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_Calls_list. This package provides data structures and code for marshalling and unmarshalling json for communicating with a running instance of btcd or bitcoind/bitcoin-qt. It also provides code for sending those messages. It does not provide any code for the client to actually deal with the messages. Although it is meant primarily for btcd, it is possible to use this code elsewhere for interacting with a bitcoin client programatically. All messages to bitcoin are of the form: The params field can vary in what it contains depending on the different method (or command) being sent. Replies will vary in form for the different commands. The basic form is: The result field can be as simple as an int, or a complex structure containing many nested fields. For cases where we have already worked out the possible types of reply, result is unmarshalled into a structure that matches the command. For others, an interface is returned. An interface is not as convenient as one needs to do a type assertion first before using the value, but it means we can handle arbitrary replies. The error field is null when there is no error. When there is an error it will return a numeric error code as well as a message describing the error. id is simply the id of the requester. All RPC calls must be authenticated with a username and password. The specifics on how to configure the RPC server varies depending on the specific bitcoin implementation. For bitcoind, this is accomplished by setting rpcuser and rpcpassword in the file ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf. For btcd, this is accomplished by setting rpcuser and rpcpass in the file ~/.btcd/btcd.conf. The default local address of bitcoind is 127.0.0.1:8332 and the default local address of btcd is 127.0.0.1:8334 The general pattern to use this package consists of generating a message (see the full list on the official bitcoin wiki), sending the message, and handling the result after asserting its type. For commands where the reply structure is known, such as getinfo, one can directly access the fields in the Reply structure by type asserting the reply to the appropriate concrete type. For other commands where this package does not yet provide a concrete implementation for the reply, such as getrawmempool, the reply uses a generic interface so one can access individual items as follows:

Package btcjson implements the bitcoin JSON-RPC API. A complete description of the JSON-RPC protocol as used by bitcoin can be found on the official wiki at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/API_reference_%28JSON-RPC%29 with a list of all the supported calls at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_Calls_list. This package provides data structures and code for marshalling and unmarshalling json for communicating with a running instance of btcd or bitcoind/bitcoin-qt. It also provides code for sending those messages. It does not provide any code for the client to actually deal with the messages. Although it is meant primarily for btcd, it is possible to use this code elsewhere for interacting with a bitcoin client programatically. All messages to bitcoin are of the form: The params field can vary in what it contains depending on the different method (or command) being sent. Replies will vary in form for the different commands. The basic form is: The result field can be as simple as an int, or a complex structure containing many nested fields. For cases where we have already worked out the possible types of reply, result is unmarshalled into a structure that matches the command. For others, an interface is returned. An interface is not as convenient as one needs to do a type assertion first before using the value, but it means we can handle arbitrary replies. The error field is null when there is no error. When there is an error it will return a numeric error code as well as a message describing the error. id is simply the id of the requester. All RPC calls must be authenticated with a username and password. The specifics on how to configure the RPC server varies depending on the specific bitcoin implementation. For bitcoind, this is accomplished by setting rpcuser and rpcpassword in the file ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf. For btcd, this is accomplished by setting rpcuser and rpcpass in the file ~/.btcd/btcd.conf. The default local address of bitcoind is 127.0.0.1:8332 and the default local address of btcd is 127.0.0.1:8334 The general pattern to use this package consists of generating a message (see the full list on the official bitcoin wiki), sending the message, and handling the result after asserting its type. For commands where the reply structure is known, such as getinfo, one can directly access the fields in the Reply structure by type asserting the reply to the appropriate concrete type. For other commands where this package does not yet provide a concrete implementation for the reply, such as getrawmempool, the reply uses a generic interface so one can access individual items as follows:

Package gobcy implements a wrapper for the http://www.blockcypher.com API. You can use it to interact with addresses, transactions, and blocks from various blockchains, including Bitcoin's main and test3 chains, and the BlockCypher test chain. Please note: we assume you use are using a 64-bit architecture for deployment, which automatically makes `int` types 64-bit. Without 64-bit ints, some values might overflow on certain calls, depending on the blockchain you are querying. If you are using a 32-bit system, you can change all `int` types to `int64` to explicitly work around this issue.

Package btcrpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Bitcoin JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Bitcoin RPC server that uses a btcd/bitcoin core compatible Bitcoin JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with btcd (https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd), btcwallet (https://github.com/btcsuite/btcwallet), and bitcoin core (https://github.com/bitcoin). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, btcd and btcwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to btcd or btcwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by btcd and btcwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by btcd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by btcd (and btcwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that btcd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named btcwallet. This means if you are connected to the btcd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, btcwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *btcjson.Error. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package btcnet defines the network parameters for the three standard Bitcoin networks and provides the ability for callers to define their own custom Bitcoin networks. In addition to the main Bitcoin network, which is intended for the transfer of monetary value, there also exists two currently active standard networks: regression test and testnet (version 3). These networks are incompatible with each other (each sharing a different genesis block) and software should handle errors where input intended for one network is used on an application instance running on a different network. For library packages, btcnet provides the ability to lookup chain parameters and encoding magics when passed a *Params. Older APIs not updated to the new convention of passing a *Params may lookup the parameters for a btcwire.BitcoinNet using ParamsForNet, but be aware that this usage is deprecated and will be removed from btcnet in the future. For main packages, a (typically global) var may be assigned the address of one of the standard Param vars for use as the application's "active" network. When a network parameter is needed, it may then be looked up through this variable (either directly, or hidden in a library call). If an application does not use one of the three standard Bitcoin networks, a new Params struct may be created which defines the parameters for the non-standard network. As a general rule of thumb, all network parameters should be unique to the network, but parameter collisions can still occur (unfortunately, this is the case with regtest and testnet3 sharing magics).

Package btcrpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Bitcoin JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Bitcoin RPC server that uses a btcd/bitcoin core compatible Bitcoin JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with btcd (https://github.com/roasbeef/btcd), btcwallet (https://github.com/btcsuite/btcwallet), and bitcoin core (https://github.com/bitcoin). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, btcd and btcwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to btcd or btcwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by btcd and btcwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by btcd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by btcd (and btcwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that btcd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named btcwallet. This means if you are connected to the btcd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, btcwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *btcjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package vcljson provides infrastructure for working with Decred JSON-RPC APIs. When communicating via the JSON-RPC protocol, all requests and responses must be marshalled to and from the wire in the appropriate format. This package provides infrastructure and primitives to ease this process. This information is not necessary in order to use this package, but it does provide some intuition into what the marshalling and unmarshalling that is discussed below is doing under the hood. As defined by the JSON-RPC spec, there are effectively two forms of messages on the wire: Request Objects {"jsonrpc":"1.0","id":"SOMEID","method":"SOMEMETHOD","params":[SOMEPARAMS]} NOTE: Notifications are the same format except the id field is null. Response Objects {"result":SOMETHING,"error":null,"id":"SOMEID"} {"result":null,"error":{"code":SOMEINT,"message":SOMESTRING},"id":"SOMEID"} For requests, the params field can vary in what it contains depending on the method (a.k.a. command) being sent. Each parameter can be as simple as an int or a complex structure containing many nested fields. The id field is used to identify a request and will be included in the associated response. When working with streamed RPC transports, such as websockets, spontaneous notifications are also possible. As indicated, they are the same as a request object, except they have the id field set to null. Therefore, servers will ignore requests with the id field set to null, while clients can choose to consume or ignore them. Unfortunately, the original Bitcoin JSON-RPC API (and hence anything compatible with it) doesn't always follow the spec and will sometimes return an error string in the result field with a null error for certain commands. However, for the most part, the error field will be set as described on failure. To simplify the marshalling of the requests and responses, the MarshalCmd and MarshalResponse functions are provided. They return the raw bytes ready to be sent across the wire. Unmarshalling a received Request object is a two step process: This approach is used since it provides the caller with access to the additional fields in the request that are not part of the command such as the ID. Unmarshalling a received Response object is also a two step process: As above, this approach is used since it provides the caller with access to the fields in the response such as the ID and Error. This package provides the NewCmd function which takes a method (command) name and variable arguments. The function includes full checking to ensure the parameters are accurate according to provided method, however these checks are, obviously, run-time which means any mistakes won't be found until the code is actually executed. However, it is quite useful for user-supplied commands that are intentionally dynamic. External packages can and should implement types implementing Command for use with MarshalCmd/ParseParams. The command handling of this package is built around the concept of registered commands. This is true for the wide variety of commands already provided by the package, but it also means caller can easily provide custom commands with all of the same functionality as the built-in commands. Use the RegisterCmd function for this purpose. A list of all registered methods can be obtained with the RegisteredCmdMethods function. All registered commands are registered with flags that identify information such as whether the command applies to a chain server, wallet server, or is a notification along with the method name to use. These flags can be obtained with the MethodUsageFlags flags, and the method can be obtained with the CmdMethod function. To facilitate providing consistent help to users of the RPC server, this package exposes the GenerateHelp and function which uses reflection on registered commands or notifications to generate the final help text. In addition, the MethodUsageText function is provided to generate consistent one-line usage for registered commands and notifications using reflection. There are 2 distinct type of errors supported by this package: The first category of errors (type Error) typically indicates a programmer error and can be avoided by properly using the API. Errors of this type will be returned from the various functions available in this package. They identify issues such as unsupported field types, attempts to register malformed commands, and attempting to create a new command with an improper number of parameters. The specific reason for the error can be detected by type asserting it to a *vcljson.Error and accessing the ErrorCode field. The second category of errors (type RPCError), on the other hand, are useful for returning errors to RPC clients. Consequently, they are used in the previously described Response type. This example demonstrates how to unmarshal a JSON-RPC response and then unmarshal the result field in the response to a concrete type.

Package btcjson implements the bitcoin JSON-RPC API. A complete description of the JSON-RPC protocol as used by bitcoin can be found on the official wiki at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/API_reference_%28JSON-RPC%29 with a list of all the supported calls at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_Calls_list. This package provides data structures and code for marshalling and unmarshalling json for communicating with a running instance of btcd or bitcoind/bitcoin-qt. It also provides code for sending those messages. It does not provide any code for the client to actually deal with the messages. Although it is meant primarily for btcd, it is possible to use this code elsewhere for interacting with a bitcoin client programatically. All messages to bitcoin are of the form: The params field can vary in what it contains depending on the different method (or command) being sent. Replies will vary in form for the different commands. The basic form is: The result field can be as simple as an int, or a complex structure containing many nested fields. For cases where we have already worked out the possible types of reply, result is unmarshalled into a structure that matches the command. For others, an interface is returned. An interface is not as convenient as one needs to do a type assertion first before using the value, but it means we can handle arbitrary replies. The error field is null when there is no error. When there is an error it will return a numeric error code as well as a message describing the error. id is simply the id of the requester. All RPC calls must be authenticated with a username and password. The specifics on how to configure the RPC server varies depending on the specific bitcoin implementation. For bitcoind, this is accomplished by setting rpcuser and rpcpassword in the file ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf. For btcd, this is accomplished by setting rpcuser and rpcpass in the file ~/.btcd/btcd.conf. The default local address of bitcoind is 127.0.0.1:8332 and the default local address of btcd is 127.0.0.1:8334 The general pattern to use this package consists of generating a message (see the full list on the official bitcoin wiki), sending the message, and handling the result after asserting its type. For commands where the reply structure is known, such as getinfo, one can directly access the fields in the Reply structure by type asserting the reply to the appropriate concrete type. For other commands where this package does not yet provide a concrete implementation for the reply, such as getrawmempool, the reply uses a generic interface so one can access individual items as follows:

Package btcnet defines the network parameters for the three standard Bitcoin networks and provides the ability for callers to define their own custom Bitcoin networks. In addition to the main Bitcoin network, which is intended for the transfer of monetary value, there also exists two currently active standard networks: regression test and testnet (version 3). These networks are incompatible with each other (each sharing a different genesis block) and software should handle errors where input intended for one network is used on an application instance running on a different network. For library packages, btcnet provides the ability to lookup chain parameters and encoding magics when passed a *Params. Older APIs not updated to the new convention of passing a *Params may lookup the parameters for a btcwire.BitcoinNet using ParamsForNet, but be aware that this usage is deprecated and will be removed from btcnet in the future. For main packages, a (typically global) var may be assigned the address of one of the standard Param vars for use as the application's "active" network. When a network parameter is needed, it may then be looked up through this variable (either directly, or hidden in a library call). If an application does not use one of the three standard Bitcoin networks, a new Params struct may be created which defines the parameters for the non-standard network. As a general rule of thumb, all network parameters should be unique to the network, but parameter collisions can still occur (unfortunately, this is the case with regtest and testnet3 sharing magics).

Package rddnet defines the network parameters for the three standard Bitcoin networks and provides the ability for callers to define their own custom Bitcoin networks. In addition to the main Bitcoin network, which is intended for the transfer of monetary value, there also exists two currently active standard networks: regression test and testnet (version 3). These networks are incompatible with each other (each sharing a different genesis block) and software should handle errors where input intended for one network is used on an application instance running on a different network. For library packages, rddnet provides the ability to lookup chain parameters and encoding magics when passed a *Params. Older APIs not updated to the new convention of passing a *Params may lookup the parameters for a rddwire.ReddcoinNet using ParamsForNet, but be aware that this usage is deprecated and will be removed from rddnet in the future. For main packages, a (typically global) var may be assigned the address of one of the standard Param vars for use as the application's "active" network. When a network parameter is needed, it may then be looked up through this variable (either directly, or hidden in a library call). If an application does not use one of the three standard Bitcoin networks, a new Params struct may be created which defines the parameters for the non-standard network. As a general rule of thumb, all network parameters should be unique to the network, but parameter collisions can still occur (unfortunately, this is the case with regtest and testnet3 sharing magics).

Package btcrpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Bitcoin JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Bitcoin RPC server that uses a btcd/bitcoin core compatible Bitcoin JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with btcd (https://github.com/ppcsuite/ppcd), btcwallet (https://github.com/ppcsuite/ppcwallet), and bitcoin core (https://github.com/bitcoin). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, btcd and btcwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to btcd or btcwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by btcd and btcwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by btcd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by btcd (and btcwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that btcd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named btcwallet. This means if you are connected to the btcd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, btcwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *btcjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory: - bitcoincorehttp Connects to a bitcoin core RPC server using HTTP POST mode with TLS disabled and gets the current block count - btcdwebsockets Connects to a btcd RPC server using TLS-secured websockets, registers for block connected and block disconnected notifications, and gets the current block count - btcwalletwebsockets Connects to a btcwallet RPC server using TLS-secured websockets, registers for notifications about changes to account balances, and gets a list of unspent transaction outputs (utxos) the wallet can sign

Package rpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Bitcoin JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Bitcoin RPC server that uses a btcd/bitcoin core compatible Bitcoin JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with btcd (https://github.com/John-Tonny/vclsuite_vcld), btcwallet (https://github.com/btcsuite/btcwallet), and bitcoin core (https://github.com/bitcoin). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, btcd and btcwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to btcd or btcwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by btcd and btcwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by btcd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by btcd (and btcwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that btcd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named btcwallet. This means if you are connected to the btcd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, btcwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *btcjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package chaincfg defines chain configuration parameters. In addition to the main Bitcoin network, which is intended for the transfer of monetary value, there also exists two currently active standard networks: regression test and testnet (version 3). These networks are incompatible with each other (each sharing a different genesis block) and software should handle errors where input intended for one network is used on an application instance running on a different network. For library packages, chaincfg provides the ability to lookup chain parameters and encoding magics when passed a *Params. Older APIs not updated to the new convention of passing a *Params may lookup the parameters for a wire.BitcoinNet using ParamsForNet, but be aware that this usage is deprecated and will be removed from chaincfg in the future. For main packages, a (typically global) var may be assigned the address of one of the standard Param vars for use as the application's "active" network. When a network parameter is needed, it may then be looked up through this variable (either directly, or hidden in a library call). If an application does not use one of the three standard Bitcoin networks, a new Params struct may be created which defines the parameters for the non-standard network. As a general rule of thumb, all network parameters should be unique to the network, but parameter collisions can still occur (unfortunately, this is the case with regtest and testnet3 sharing magics).

Package chaincfg defines chain configuration parameters. In addition to the main Bitcoin network, which is intended for the transfer of monetary value, there also exists two currently active standard networks: regression test and testnet (version 3). These networks are incompatible with each other (each sharing a different genesis block) and software should handle errors where input intended for one network is used on an application instance running on a different network. For library packages, chaincfg provides the ability to lookup chain parameters and encoding magics when passed a *Params. Older APIs not updated to the new convention of passing a *Params may lookup the parameters for a wire.BitcoinNet using ParamsForNet, but be aware that this usage is deprecated and will be removed from chaincfg in the future. For main packages, a (typically global) var may be assigned the address of one of the standard Param vars for use as the application's "active" network. When a network parameter is needed, it may then be looked up through this variable (either directly, or hidden in a library call). If an application does not use one of the three standard Bitcoin networks, a new Params struct may be created which defines the parameters for the non-standard network. As a general rule of thumb, all network parameters should be unique to the network, but parameter collisions can still occur (unfortunately, this is the case with regtest and testnet3 sharing magics).

Package mtgox provides a streaming implementation of Mt. Gox's bitcoin trading API.

Package rpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Decred JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Decred RPC server that uses a mostly btcd/bitcoin core style Decred JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with dcrd (https://github.com/decred/dcrd) and dcrwallet (https://github.com/decred/dcrwallet). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, dcrd and dcrwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to dcrd or dcrwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by dcrd and dcrwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by dcrd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by dcrd (and dcrwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that dcrd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named dcrwallet. This means if you are connected to the dcrd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, dcrwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *dcrjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package rpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Decred JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Decred RPC server that uses a mostly btcd/bitcoin core style Decred JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with dcrd (https://github.com/decred/dcrd) and dcrwallet (https://github.com/decred/dcrwallet). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, dcrd and dcrwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to dcrd or dcrwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by dcrd and dcrwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by dcrd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by dcrd (and dcrwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that dcrd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named dcrwallet. This means if you are connected to the dcrd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, dcrwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *dcrjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package btcrpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Bitcoin JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Bitcoin RPC server that uses a btcd/bitcoin core compatible Bitcoin JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with btcd (https://github.com/monetas/btcd), btcwallet (https://github.com/monetas/btcwallet), and bitcoin core (https://github.com/bitcoin). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, btcd and btcwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to btcd or btcwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by btcd and btcwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by btcd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by btcd (and btcwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that btcd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named btcwallet. This means if you are connected to the btcd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, btcwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *btcjson.Error. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package mtgox provides a streaming implementation of Mt. Gox's bitcoin trading API.

Package dcrjson provides primitives for working with the Decred JSON-RPC API. When communicating via the JSON-RPC protocol, all of the commands need to be marshalled to and from the the wire in the appropriate format. This package provides data structures and primitives to ease this process. In addition, it also provides some additional features such as custom command registration, command categorization, and reflection-based help generation. This information is not necessary in order to use this package, but it does provide some intuition into what the marshalling and unmarshalling that is discussed below is doing under the hood. As defined by the JSON-RPC spec, there are effectively two forms of messages on the wire: Request Objects {"jsonrpc":"1.0","id":"SOMEID","method":"SOMEMETHOD","params":[SOMEPARAMS]} NOTE: Notifications are the same format except the id field is null. Response Objects {"result":SOMETHING,"error":null,"id":"SOMEID"} {"result":null,"error":{"code":SOMEINT,"message":SOMESTRING},"id":"SOMEID"} For requests, the params field can vary in what it contains depending on the method (a.k.a. command) being sent. Each parameter can be as simple as an int or a complex structure containing many nested fields. The id field is used to identify a request and will be included in the associated response. When working with asynchronous transports, such as websockets, spontaneous notifications are also possible. As indicated, they are the same as a request object, except they have the id field set to null. Therefore, servers will ignore requests with the id field set to null, while clients can choose to consume or ignore them. Unfortunately, the original Bitcoin JSON-RPC API (and hence anything compatible with it) doesn't always follow the spec and will sometimes return an error string in the result field with a null error for certain commands. However, for the most part, the error field will be set as described on failure. Based upon the discussion above, it should be easy to see how the types of this package map into the required parts of the protocol To simplify the marshalling of the requests and responses, the MarshalCmd and MarshalResponse functions are provided. They return the raw bytes ready to be sent across the wire. Unmarshalling a received Request object is a two step process: This approach is used since it provides the caller with access to the additional fields in the request that are not part of the command such as the ID. Unmarshalling a received Response object is also a two step process: As above, this approach is used since it provides the caller with access to the fields in the response such as the ID and Error. This package provides two approaches for creating a new command. This first, and preferred, method is to use one of the New<Foo>Cmd functions. This allows static compile-time checking to help ensure the parameters stay in sync with the struct definitions. The second approach is the NewCmd function which takes a method (command) name and variable arguments. The function includes full checking to ensure the parameters are accurate according to provided method, however these checks are, obviously, run-time which means any mistakes won't be found until the code is actually executed. However, it is quite useful for user-supplied commands that are intentionally dynamic. The command handling of this package is built around the concept of registered commands. This is true for the wide variety of commands already provided by the package, but it also means caller can easily provide custom commands with all of the same functionality as the built-in commands. Use the RegisterCmd function for this purpose. A list of all registered methods can be obtained with the RegisteredCmdMethods function. All registered commands are registered with flags that identify information such as whether the command applies to a chain server, wallet server, or is a notification along with the method name to use. These flags can be obtained with the MethodUsageFlags flags, and the method can be obtained with the CmdMethod function. To facilitate providing consistent help to users of the RPC server, this package exposes the GenerateHelp and function which uses reflection on registered commands or notifications, as well as the provided expected result types, to generate the final help text. In addition, the MethodUsageText function is provided to generate consistent one-line usage for registered commands and notifications using reflection. There are 2 distinct type of errors supported by this package: The first category of errors (type Error) typically indicates a programmer error and can be avoided by properly using the API. Errors of this type will be returned from the various functions available in this package. They identify issues such as unsupported field types, attempts to register malformed commands, and attempting to create a new command with an improper number of parameters. The specific reason for the error can be detected by type asserting it to a *dcrjson.Error and accessing the ErrorCode field. The second category of errors (type RPCError), on the other hand, are useful for returning errors to RPC clients. Consequently, they are used in the previously described Response type. This example demonstrates how to unmarshal a JSON-RPC response and then unmarshal the result field in the response to a concrete type.

Package models contains all models (contracts) between spv-wallet api and other spv-wallet solutions

Package address provides APIs to encode and decode addresses for bitcoin-like coins.

Package wif provides APIs to encode and decode Bitcoin private keys in Wallet Import Format.

Package dcrjson provides infrastructure for working with Decred JSON-RPC APIs. When communicating via the JSON-RPC protocol, all requests and responses must be marshalled to and from the wire in the appropriate format. This package provides infrastructure and primitives to ease this process. This information is not necessary in order to use this package, but it does provide some intuition into what the marshalling and unmarshalling that is discussed below is doing under the hood. As defined by the JSON-RPC spec, there are effectively two forms of messages on the wire: Request Objects {"jsonrpc":"1.0","id":"SOMEID","method":"SOMEMETHOD","params":[SOMEPARAMS]} NOTE: Notifications are the same format except the id field is null. Response Objects {"result":SOMETHING,"error":null,"id":"SOMEID"} {"result":null,"error":{"code":SOMEINT,"message":SOMESTRING},"id":"SOMEID"} For requests, the params field can vary in what it contains depending on the method (a.k.a. command) being sent. Each parameter can be as simple as an int or a complex structure containing many nested fields. The id field is used to identify a request and will be included in the associated response. When working with streamed RPC transports, such as websockets, spontaneous notifications are also possible. As indicated, they are the same as a request object, except they have the id field set to null. Therefore, servers will ignore requests with the id field set to null, while clients can choose to consume or ignore them. Unfortunately, the original Bitcoin JSON-RPC API (and hence anything compatible with it) doesn't always follow the spec and will sometimes return an error string in the result field with a null error for certain commands. However, for the most part, the error field will be set as described on failure. To simplify the marshalling of the requests and responses, the MarshalCmd and MarshalResponse functions are provided. They return the raw bytes ready to be sent across the wire. Unmarshalling a received Request object is a two step process: This approach is used since it provides the caller with access to the additional fields in the request that are not part of the command such as the ID. Unmarshalling a received Response object is also a two step process: As above, this approach is used since it provides the caller with access to the fields in the response such as the ID and Error. This package provides the NewCmd function which takes a method (command) name and variable arguments. The function includes full checking to ensure the parameters are accurate according to provided method, however these checks are, obviously, run-time which means any mistakes won't be found until the code is actually executed. However, it is quite useful for user-supplied commands that are intentionally dynamic. External packages can and should implement types implementing Command for use with MarshalCmd/ParseParams. The command handling of this package is built around the concept of registered commands. This is true for the wide variety of commands already provided by the package, but it also means caller can easily provide custom commands with all of the same functionality as the built-in commands. Use the RegisterCmd function for this purpose. A list of all registered methods can be obtained with the RegisteredCmdMethods function. All registered commands are registered with flags that identify information such as whether the command applies to a chain server, wallet server, or is a notification along with the method name to use. These flags can be obtained with the MethodUsageFlags flags, and the method can be obtained with the CmdMethod function. To facilitate providing consistent help to users of the RPC server, this package exposes the GenerateHelp and function which uses reflection on registered commands or notifications to generate the final help text. In addition, the MethodUsageText function is provided to generate consistent one-line usage for registered commands and notifications using reflection. There are 2 distinct type of errors supported by this package: The first category of errors (type Error) typically indicates a programmer error and can be avoided by properly using the API. Errors of this type will be returned from the various functions available in this package. They identify issues such as unsupported field types, attempts to register malformed commands, and attempting to create a new command with an improper number of parameters. The specific reason for the error can be detected by type asserting it to a *dcrjson.Error and accessing the ErrorKind field. The second category of errors (type RPCError), on the other hand, are useful for returning errors to RPC clients. Consequently, they are used in the previously described Response type. This example demonstrates how to unmarshal a JSON-RPC response and then unmarshal the result field in the response to a concrete type.

Package base58check provides APIs to encode and decode binary data in Bitcoin base58-check format.

Package dcrjson provides infrastructure for working with Hdfchain JSON-RPC APIs. When communicating via the JSON-RPC protocol, all requests and responses must be marshalled to and from the wire in the appropriate format. This package provides infrastructure and primitives to ease this process. This information is not necessary in order to use this package, but it does provide some intuition into what the marshalling and unmarshalling that is discussed below is doing under the hood. As defined by the JSON-RPC spec, there are effectively two forms of messages on the wire: Request Objects {"jsonrpc":"1.0","id":"SOMEID","method":"SOMEMETHOD","params":[SOMEPARAMS]} NOTE: Notifications are the same format except the id field is null. Response Objects {"result":SOMETHING,"error":null,"id":"SOMEID"} {"result":null,"error":{"code":SOMEINT,"message":SOMESTRING},"id":"SOMEID"} For requests, the params field can vary in what it contains depending on the method (a.k.a. command) being sent. Each parameter can be as simple as an int or a complex structure containing many nested fields. The id field is used to identify a request and will be included in the associated response. When working with streamed RPC transports, such as websockets, spontaneous notifications are also possible. As indicated, they are the same as a request object, except they have the id field set to null. Therefore, servers will ignore requests with the id field set to null, while clients can choose to consume or ignore them. Unfortunately, the original Bitcoin JSON-RPC API (and hence anything compatible with it) doesn't always follow the spec and will sometimes return an error string in the result field with a null error for certain commands. However, for the most part, the error field will be set as described on failure. To simplify the marshalling of the requests and responses, the MarshalCmd and MarshalResponse functions are provided. They return the raw bytes ready to be sent across the wire. Unmarshalling a received Request object is a two step process: This approach is used since it provides the caller with access to the additional fields in the request that are not part of the command such as the ID. Unmarshalling a received Response object is also a two step process: As above, this approach is used since it provides the caller with access to the fields in the response such as the ID and Error. This package provides the NewCmd function which takes a method (command) name and variable arguments. The function includes full checking to ensure the parameters are accurate according to provided method, however these checks are, obviously, run-time which means any mistakes won't be found until the code is actually executed. However, it is quite useful for user-supplied commands that are intentionally dynamic. External packages can and should implement types implementing Command for use with MarshalCmd/ParseParams. The command handling of this package is built around the concept of registered commands. This is true for the wide variety of commands already provided by the package, but it also means caller can easily provide custom commands with all of the same functionality as the built-in commands. Use the RegisterCmd function for this purpose. A list of all registered methods can be obtained with the RegisteredCmdMethods function. All registered commands are registered with flags that identify information such as whether the command applies to a chain server, wallet server, or is a notification along with the method name to use. These flags can be obtained with the MethodUsageFlags flags, and the method can be obtained with the CmdMethod function. To facilitate providing consistent help to users of the RPC server, this package exposes the GenerateHelp and function which uses reflection on registered commands or notifications to generate the final help text. In addition, the MethodUsageText function is provided to generate consistent one-line usage for registered commands and notifications using reflection. There are 2 distinct type of errors supported by this package: The first category of errors (type Error) typically indicates a programmer error and can be avoided by properly using the API. Errors of this type will be returned from the various functions available in this package. They identify issues such as unsupported field types, attempts to register malformed commands, and attempting to create a new command with an improper number of parameters. The specific reason for the error can be detected by type asserting it to a *dcrjson.Error and accessing the ErrorCode field. The second category of errors (type RPCError), on the other hand, are useful for returning errors to RPC clients. Consequently, they are used in the previously described Response type. This example demonstrates how to unmarshal a JSON-RPC response and then unmarshal the result field in the response to a concrete type.

Package hcrpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Hcd JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Hcd RPC server that uses a mostly btcd/bitcoin core style Hcd JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with hcd (https://github.com/HcashOrg/hcd) and hcwallet (https://github.com/HcashOrg/hcwallet). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, hcd and hcwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to hcd or hcwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by hcd and hcwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by hcd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by hcd (and hcwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that hcd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named hcwallet. This means if you are connected to the hcd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, hcwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *hcjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package btcrpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Bitcoin JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Bitcoin RPC server that uses a btcd/bitcoin core compatible Bitcoin JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with btcd (https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd), btcwallet (https://github.com/btcsuite/btcwallet), and bitcoin core (https://github.com/bitcoin). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, btcd and btcwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to btcd or btcwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by btcd and btcwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by btcd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by btcd (and btcwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that btcd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named btcwallet. This means if you are connected to the btcd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, btcwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *btcjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package crock32 provides an API for working with modified base32 and Base32Check encodings. Modified base32 Encoding ... The Base32Check encoding scheme is primarily used for Bitcoin addresses at the time of this writing, however it can be used to generically encode arbitrary byte arrays into human-readable strings along with a version byte that can be used to differentiate the same payload. For Bitcoin addresses, the extra version is used to differentiate the network of otherwise identical public keys which helps prevent using an address intended for one network on another.

Package hcrpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Hcd JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Hcd RPC server that uses a mostly btcd/bitcoin core style Hcd JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with hcd (https://github.com/HcashOrg/hcd) and hcwallet (https://github.com/HcashOrg/hcwallet). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, hcd and hcwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to hcd or hcwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by hcd and hcwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by hcd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by hcd (and hcwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that hcd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named hcwallet. This means if you are connected to the hcd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, hcwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *hcjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package btcrpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Bitcoin JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Bitcoin RPC server that uses a btcd/bitcoin core compatible Bitcoin JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with btcd (https://github.com/jchavannes/btcd), btcwallet (https://github.com/btcsuite/btcwallet), and bitcoin core (https://github.com/bitcoin). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, btcd and btcwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to btcd or btcwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by btcd and btcwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by btcd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by btcd (and btcwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that btcd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named btcwallet. This means if you are connected to the btcd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, btcwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *btcjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package dcrrpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Decred JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Decred RPC server that uses a mostly btcd/bitcoin core style Decred JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with dcrd (https://github.com/decred/dcrd) and dcrwallet (https://github.com/decred/dcrwallet). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, dcrd and dcrwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to dcrd or dcrwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by dcrd and dcrwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by dcrd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by dcrd (and dcrwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that dcrd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named dcrwallet. This means if you are connected to the dcrd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, dcrwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *dcrjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package gobcy implements a wrapper for the http://www.blockcypher.com API. You can use it to interact with addresses, transactions, and blocks from various blockchains, including Bitcoin's main and test3 chains, and the BlockCypher test chain. Please note: we assume you use are using a 64-bit architecture for deployment, which automatically makes `int` types 64-bit. Without 64-bit ints, some values might overflow on certain calls, depending on the blockchain you are querying. If you are using a 32-bit system, you can change all `int` types to `int64` to explicitly work around this issue.

Package rpcclient implements a Bitcoin Core JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Bitcoin RPC server that uses a Bitcoin Core compatible Bitcoin JSON-RPC API. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically ErrInvalidAuth or ErrClientShutdown. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *btcjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: Check the examples directory.

Package rpcclient implements a Bitcoin Core JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Bitcoin RPC server that uses a Bitcoin Core compatible Bitcoin JSON-RPC API. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically ErrInvalidAuth or ErrClientShutdown. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *btcjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: Check the examples directory.

Package hcrpcclient implements a websocket-enabled Hcd JSON-RPC client. This client provides a robust and easy to use client for interfacing with a Hcd RPC server that uses a mostly btcd/bitcoin core style Hcd JSON-RPC API. This client has been tested with hcd (https://github.com/james-ray/hcd) and hcwallet (https://github.com/HcashOrg/hcwallet). In addition to the compatible standard HTTP POST JSON-RPC API, hcd and hcwallet provide a websocket interface that is more efficient than the standard HTTP POST method of accessing RPC. The section below discusses the differences between HTTP POST and websockets. By default, this client assumes the RPC server supports websockets and has TLS enabled. In practice, this currently means it assumes you are talking to hcd or hcwallet by default. However, configuration options are provided to fall back to HTTP POST and disable TLS to support talking with inferior bitcoin core style RPC servers. In HTTP POST-based JSON-RPC, every request creates a new HTTP connection, issues the call, waits for the response, and closes the connection. This adds quite a bit of overhead to every call and lacks flexibility for features such as notifications. In contrast, the websocket-based JSON-RPC interface provided by hcd and hcwallet only uses a single connection that remains open and allows asynchronous bi-directional communication. The websocket interface supports all of the same commands as HTTP POST, but they can be invoked without having to go through a connect/disconnect cycle for every call. In addition, the websocket interface provides other nice features such as the ability to register for asynchronous notifications of various events. The client provides both a synchronous (blocking) and asynchronous API. The synchronous (blocking) API is typically sufficient for most use cases. It works by issuing the RPC and blocking until the response is received. This allows straightforward code where you have the response as soon as the function returns. The asynchronous API works on the concept of futures. When you invoke the async version of a command, it will quickly return an instance of a type that promises to provide the result of the RPC at some future time. In the background, the RPC call is issued and the result is stored in the returned instance. Invoking the Receive method on the returned instance will either return the result immediately if it has already arrived, or block until it has. This is useful since it provides the caller with greater control over concurrency. The first important part of notifications is to realize that they will only work when connected via websockets. This should intuitively make sense because HTTP POST mode does not keep a connection open! All notifications provided by hcd require registration to opt-in. For example, if you want to be notified when funds are received by a set of addresses, you register the addresses via the NotifyReceived (or NotifyReceivedAsync) function. Notifications are exposed by the client through the use of callback handlers which are setup via a NotificationHandlers instance that is specified by the caller when creating the client. It is important that these notification handlers complete quickly since they are intentionally in the main read loop and will block further reads until they complete. This provides the caller with the flexibility to decide what to do when notifications are coming in faster than they are being handled. In particular this means issuing a blocking RPC call from a callback handler will cause a deadlock as more server responses won't be read until the callback returns, but the callback would be waiting for a response. Thus, any additional RPCs must be issued an a completely decoupled manner. By default, when running in websockets mode, this client will automatically keep trying to reconnect to the RPC server should the connection be lost. There is a back-off in between each connection attempt until it reaches one try per minute. Once a connection is re-established, all previously registered notifications are automatically re-registered and any in-flight commands are re-issued. This means from the caller's perspective, the request simply takes longer to complete. The caller may invoke the Shutdown method on the client to force the client to cease reconnect attempts and return ErrClientShutdown for all outstanding commands. The automatic reconnection can be disabled by setting the DisableAutoReconnect flag to true in the connection config when creating the client. Minor RPC Server Differences and Chain/Wallet Separation Some of the commands are extensions specific to a particular RPC server. For example, the DebugLevel call is an extension only provided by hcd (and hcwallet passthrough). Therefore if you call one of these commands against an RPC server that doesn't provide them, you will get an unimplemented error from the server. An effort has been made to call out which commmands are extensions in their documentation. Also, it is important to realize that hcd intentionally separates the wallet functionality into a separate process named hcwallet. This means if you are connected to the hcd RPC server directly, only the RPCs which are related to chain services will be available. Depending on your application, you might only need chain-related RPCs. In contrast, hcwallet provides pass through treatment for chain-related RPCs, so it supports them in addition to wallet-related RPCs. There are 3 categories of errors that will be returned throughout this package: The first category of errors are typically one of ErrInvalidAuth, ErrInvalidEndpoint, ErrClientDisconnect, or ErrClientShutdown. NOTE: The ErrClientDisconnect will not be returned unless the DisableAutoReconnect flag is set since the client automatically handles reconnect by default as previously described. The second category of errors typically indicates a programmer error and as such the type can vary, but usually will be best handled by simply showing/logging it. The third category of errors, that is errors returned by the server, can be detected by type asserting the error in a *hcjson.RPCError. For example, to detect if a command is unimplemented by the remote RPC server: The following full-blown client examples are in the examples directory:

Package gobcy implements a wrapper for the http://www.blockcypher.com API. You can use it to interact with addresses, transactions, and blocks from various blockchains, including Bitcoin's main and test3 chains, and the BlockCypher test chain. Please note: we assume you use are using a 64-bit architecture for deployment, which automatically makes `int` types 64-bit. Without 64-bit ints, some values might overflow on certain calls, depending on the blockchain you are querying. If you are using a 32-bit system, you can change all `int` types to `int64` to explicitly work around this issue.