BitcoinMonolith

Experimental Bitcoin node and client. Still a work in progress, not ready for real use yet.

For learning, hacking, or just messing around (for now). Still way too early.

Fully written in verifiable Deno + TypeScript, so it’s friendly to more devs and easy to inspect.

The main goal is to optimize storage (reduce indexed full-node size to less than half of a typical implementation).

We prioritize UX and simplicity. The end user is a normal everyday Bitcoin user, not a protocol nerd.

We are not trying to change Bitcoin. We are simply giving you a way to use Bitcoin in the best way possible, with less storage and less friction.

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Update: I changed my mind

I’ve been working on this for a while, and the more I build, the more I feel this project would be even better (and more understandable) with ECS and game loops.

Current plan:

1. First, make the storage optimization work with the current Deno/TypeScript codebase and actually get a full node that takes significantly less disk space. 2. After that succeeds, I’ll move the implementation to modern C# using an ECS library (https://github.com/Felid-Force-Studios/StaticEcs).

Deno/TS is for fast iteration and proving the storage model.
C# + ECS will be for long-term performance, parallelism, and game-loop style logic.

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Notes

• The whole codebase uses wire format internally, so there is no .reverse() or .toReversed() anywhere in the core logic, except when making things like console logs human-readable.
• I call the original implementation of Bitcoin and anything legacy “satoshi”. For example:
  • Satoshi client
  • Satoshi RPC
  • Satoshi TPC or Satoshi P2P
  • computeSatoshiMerkleRoot
  • “satoshi address type”
• Internally, I use 4 MB as max block weight:
  • Witness is weighted 1×
  • Non-witness data is weighted 4×
• computeSatoshiMerkleRoot returns empty bytes (void) instead of a [hash, mutated] pair. There is no mutated boolean.

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Short-Term Goal

• Install Termux on your phone.
• pkg install deno
• deno run -A bitcoinmonolith.ts
• Have a full node with full history, running on your phone and actually fitting in its storage.

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Long-Term Goals

• Be a full node with aggressive storage optimization.
• Support Satoshi RPC endpoints.
• Support Electrum endpoints.
• Provide a web app interface on localhost:
  • Ship a webview as a desktop / mobile app GUI.
  • Include a mempool.space-like explorer built-in.
  • Support isolated WASM plugins for mempool filters and other logic (for example, DATUM).
  • Plugin “store” over Nostr.
  • Built-in plugins:
    • DATUM
    • Filtering plugins
    • Delayed propagation of blocks that don’t fit your filters, based on the weight of “bad” transactions (e.g. delay 5–10 minutes, maybe up to 1 hour max depending on weight).
• Eventually, when everything else is done, introduce a new communication protocol over HTTP and WebSockets, with optional PoW requirements even for read requests.
• Unlike Satoshi clients, this should work out of the box without downloading the entire chain first:
  • It can behave like a light client at the beginning and download missing block data on demand.
  • For example: as you scroll the explorer block list, it lazily fetches the block data you’re looking at.
  • It still validates block data and handles chain reorgs.
  • Background workers will download missing historical block data from genesis to tip, with a bandwidth cap you set.
  • At the end of the day, you still have the whole chain downloaded and validated, but you don’t need to wait for full sync to start using the client.
• Make it work well on mobile devices, which will require even better storage optimizations.
• Let you do everything Bitcoin-related from this client, without needing to set up complex third-party software and manually glue everything together. Plugins + built-in features handle it.
• So your grandma can run a useful node.