Silent Payments light client workshop

This workshop is meant to introduce the silent payments scheme and prototype a light client using BIP 158 block filters.

You can read the draft BIP (and leave comments/feedback!) here: https://github.com/josibake/bips/blob/silent-payments-bip-draft/bip-0000.mediawiki

Setup

You will need to compile bitcoind from the Silent Payments DRAFT PR. Instructions for compiling Bitcoin from the source can be found here.

Once you've successfully compiled the PR branch, you'll need to start a regtest node. For convenience, there is a node-regtest/ folder included which has some helpful scripts and uses direnv to avoid conflicting with your local Bitcoin node/development environment. To use, simply copy your compiled bitcoind and bitcoin-cli binaries to the folder like so:

cp <path/to/bitcoin/repo>/src/bitcoind ~/silent-payments-workshop/node-regtest/bin
cp <path/to/bitcoin/repo>/src/bitcoin-cli ~/silent-payments-workshope/node-regtest/bin

Instructions for installing direnv can be found here.

Setting up your Bitcoin Core node

Use the following config options in your bitcoin.conf file:

regtest=1
fallbackfee=0.0001
txindex=1
daemon=1
blockfilterindex=1
peerblockfilters=1
rpcuser=silent
rpcpassword=payments

Next, create a silent_payment enabled wallet:

bitcoin-cli -named createwallet wallet_name=sender silent_payment=true

Mine some blocks and verify that your wallet has a spendable balance:

bitcoin-cli -generate 101
bitcoin-cli getwalletinfo

Setting up your python venv

Create a python virtual environment:

python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

You should now be able to open the workshop notebook with:

jupyter notebook silent-payments-workshop.ipynb