Programming Bitcoin

Chapter 10. Networking

The peer-to-peer network that Bitcoin runs on is what gives it a lot of its robustness. More than 65,000 nodes are running on the network as of this writing and are communicating constantly.

The Bitcoin network is a broadcast network, or gossip network. Every node is announcing different transactions, blocks, and peers that it knows about. The protocol is rich and has a lot of features that have been added to it over the years.

One thing to note about the networking protocol is that it is not consensus-critical. The same data can be sent from one node to another using some other protocol and the blockchain itself will not be affected.

With that in mind, we’ll work in this chapter toward requesting, receiving, and validating block headers using the network protocol.

Network Messages

All network messages look like Figure 10-1.

The first 4 bytes are always the same and are referred to as the network magic. Magic bytes are common in network programming as the communication is asynchronous and can be intermittent. Magic bytes give the receiver of the message a place to start should the communication get interrupted (say, by your phone dropping signal). They are also useful for identifying the network. You would not want a Bitcoin node to connect to a Litecoin node, for example. Thus, a Litecoin node has a different magic. Bitcoin testnet also has a different magic, 0b110907, as opposed to the Bitcoin mainnet magic, f9beb4d9.

Figure 10-1. A network message—the ...