Proof of work that runs on your CPU

Bitcoin 0.1.0, revived: same consensus rules, RandomX instead of SHA-256, and every node addressed by its own key over an encrypted rendezvous. No premine. No company. 21 million.

—block height

—relays up

50 BTFblock reward

—mined so far

Read every 30 seconds from status.json, which is a live P2P handshake with a node rather than a cached number. A grey dot means this page could not reach the status daemon.

01How nodes meet

Nothing dials by IP. A node is addressed by its own public key and reached through an encrypted tunnel, so it works behind CGNAT and no peer learns where it is.

Addressing

# a node's address is its key, like a .onion
52 base32 chars .btf

# what it publishes, signed with that key
descriptor = address + encryption key + current relay
# nobody can forge one for an address they do not own

Discovery, in the order it is tried

btfpeers.json      peers that answered last time
nostr relays       where descriptors are published
rendezvous relay   where two nodes are paired
peer exchange      descriptors handed over by peers

The handshake, once paired

magic    bf 20 5c fd
-> version  101 | services | time | addr | height
<- version  101 | services | time | addr | height

# the height above is what the status page reads

02How a wallet is rebuilt

Twelve words rebuild the keys. The derivation is written down in full, with test vectors and a script that reproduces it using nothing but Python's standard library, so the words keep working even if this software does not.

The phrase

$ bitflash -newphrase
# printed once, to the terminal, never to debug.log

$ bitflash -restorephrase="twelve words"
# walks 100 addresses at a time, rescanning,
# and stops when a whole batch turns up nothing

The file

$ bitflash -backupwallet=backup.dat
# a copy that opens on its own

# copying wallet.dat by hand is NOT a backup:
# berkeley db ties it to the directory beside it

When the database will not open

$ bitflash -dumpwallet=keys.txt
$ bitflash -importwallet=keys.txt
# one key per line, no database, any machine
# it is your keys in the clear: move it, delete it

Keys made before the seed was installed are random: they do not come back from the words. That is why both backups exist, and it is where people lose money. The derivation specification.

03How you mine

RandomX is memory-hard and built for general-purpose CPUs, so a laptop competes with a server and an ASIC has no advantage worth the electricity.

On your own

$ ./bitflash -nogui -gen
# or from the window: Options > Mining Mode

Run a pool

$ ./bitflash -nogui -gen -operator
# the pool server is in the node,
# reachable over .btf rendezvous only

Point a miner at one

$ xmrig -a rx/0 -o POOL.btf -u YOU.btf -p x
$ SRBMiner-MULTI --algorithm randomx \
    --pool POOL.btf --wallet YOU.btf --password x

04Parameters

Ticker: BTF
Proof of work: RandomX, memory-hard, CPU
Block time: ~2 minutes
Retarget: every 30 blocks
Reward: 50 BTF, halving every 210,000
Halving: ~292 days
Supply: 21,000,000 BTF
Maturity: 100 blocks
Sig ops: 20,000 per block
P2P port: 8433
Relay port: 8434
Protocol: 101
Premine: none
Licence: MIT

05Get it

Download v1.2.15 Manual Source

# check what you downloaded before you run it
$ sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS

# linux
$ chmod +x Bitflash-*.AppImage && ./Bitflash-*.AppImage

# windows: extract the zip, run Bitflash.exe

Consensus rules have changed since the first releases, so an old build quietly follows a different chain. Keep the node current, write the twelve words on paper, and do not put in more than you are willing to lose.