rbitcoin: Bitcoin Full Node With Zero Human Code | reardencode SLP775

Stephan Livera (0:00)

Hi, everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about, well, kind of, I wanted to do a little mini-series about non-Bitcoin Core implementations of Bitcoin. And my friend, Reardon Code, aka Brandon Black, is doing one. It's called R-Bitcoin. So I wanted to welcome Reardon back to the show.

Brandon Black (0:19)

It's great to be here, Stephan. Great to talk with you and excited to share what I've been doing with R-Bitcoin.

Stephan Livera (0:24)

So obvious questions first. Why do we even need non-Bitcoin core implementations of Bitcoin?

Why from your perspective?

Brandon Black (0:34)

So for me, there were really two or maybe three reasons to make R-Bitcoin. One is that Bitcoin Core at this point is old C++ software. And as such, it has some baggage that comes with being old C++ software. And I wanted to see, in some ways, this is similar to why Roast Beef made BTCD. He didn't like C++. He wanted an implementation in Go that he could work on. So I wanted to see if we do it in Rust, which is the more modern language that has a lot of the same, let's say, utility++, but with better protections, better type system, etc. What would that look like? Would it be performant? Would it be bad? How would it go? So that was one reason.

Another is that I think Bitcoin Core was developed before we knew how Bitcoin would grow over the years.

And so the data structure is used, reflect almost a naivete of the future. And they have done an absolutely, and I mean this in absolute sincerity, incredible job over at Bitcoin Core of growing with the network. And as you know, Jameson, Lopp does benchmarks, and Core has mostly managed to keep sync time the same, even as the blockchain and the UTXO set grow on equivalent hardware. And that's just an exceptional achievement. But I was curious again to see what would be different if we use a different kind of data structure. Could we compress the blockchain? Could we have better performance that's more stable over time? What would it look like? So different data structures.

And then I guess lastly, I've had my challenges with the Bitcoin Core organization structure as well over the years. Again, they do an exceptional job of a lot of what they do, but I don't feel like they're playing a leadership role in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And so I wonder also, and I was talking with John Attak on X earlier today about this, how could we look at different possible governance models for Bitcoin implementations? And so at this point, we have now quite a few different Bitcoin implementations out there. There's Rbitcoin, there's Libbitcoin, there's BTCD, there's SATD, there's Hornet node. I think there's a few others I'm missing even in there. And as John said, each of these has a strong leader, as opposed to a decentralized leaderless group. And maybe there's a benefit to that.

So all of this kind of comes together. Oh, even a fourth reason, actually, I am frustrated all the time that I have to run two daemons to get my wallet that use Electrum or Aspora protocol to sync connected to my Bitcoin node. And so I wanted a single daemon. Now, of course, there are other implementations that do that. So that's not on its own a single reason. I think both Sat-D and Libbitcoin also provide Asplora and Electrum in the same process.

Stephan Livera (3:20)

And maybe even Floresta there too. But you're gone?

Brandon Black (3:22)

Floresta, yeah. Anyway, so those are all of my reasons for building it. I've wanted to do something like this for years and years, like almost a decade basically. But without AI, I couldn't do it.

I'm not going to manage a massive project or get a budget to build if I have to hire developers. But now with AI, I could build it mostly single handed. Some contributors now that I really appreciate, but yeah.

Stephan Livera (3:46)

So one other thing before we get to the AI thing, I also just wanted to maybe you can set the scene a little bit because this is the first episode in this little mini-series, let's say I'm going to try to get some other people on. Obviously, I try to get Laolu on from BGCD, maybe Calvin as well. I'll try and get some other people on. But can you just give a sense of rough numbers?

How many people are using Core? What percent is on Core? What percent is on using some of the others? I think it's about 80 Last I checked on... Actually, you know what? Let's just get the numbers right now. Coin.dance of the 25,720 public nodes running on the Bitcoin network, 21,385 are Bitcoin Core. It says 4,300 are Bitcoin NOTs, but I presume that's obviously pre-110. Then there are 17 BTCD nodes. We have two Libitcoin nodes.