btc-p2p

Bitcoin P2P Manager

Manage a network of peers in a Bitcoin peer-to-peer network.

Events

The BTCNetwork object translates the raw network messages received from the PeerManager into parsed objects. Here's the differences between the various events (Events are identified like Object::EventName):

• Peer::message: { peer: Peer, command: STRING, data: Buffer } Raw message, fired for every message. Bubbled-up as PeerManager::message
• BTCNetwork::message: { peer: Peer, command: STRING, data: { version: INT, services: Buffer, time: INT, ...} Parsed data
• Peer::versionMessage: { peer: Peer, data: Buffer } Raw message. Bubbled-up by PeerManager as PeerManager::versionMessage
• BTCNetwork::versionMessage: { peer: Peer, version: INT, services: Buffer, time: INT, ... } Parsed data

This is accomplished by several message handlers on the BTCNetwork object, named in the format parseCommandMessage (e.g. parseVersionMessage, parseInvMessage, parseGetaddrMessage, etc.). If a handler is not found for a message type, the raw form is bubbled up. To handle additional types of messages, add a parser method named appropriately, and it will be passed data as an argument, which is the message payload in Buffer form. It must return an object; if the result is an array (i.e inv messages), return an object with one property set to the array (i.e. { items: ARRAY }).

In addition to a parser method, a handleCommandMessage method can be defined, which will be passed the parsed result, and peer as arguments, where peer is the Peer who sent the message.

These parsing methods mean, that if you're subscribed to an event stream that presents raw data (i.e. the versionMessage events from an individual Peer), you can parse them like:

var p = new Peer('example.com');
var btc = new BTCNetwork();

p.on('versionMessage', function(d) {
  var parsed = btc.parseVersionMessage(d.data);
});