Bitcoin Cash Developers Launch Beta Bchd Client Written in Golang

On Nov. 18, a few days after the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) fork, Openbazaar developer Chris Pacia announced the launch of Bchd, a full node implementation of the BCH chain written in Golang. Pacia and contributors have detailed that it’s been over two months since the Bchd client was forked from Btcd reference code and so far the new library has seen a “large amount of development.”

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The Bitcoin Cash Bchd Library

The Bitcoin Cash community has been introduced to a full node client written in the Golang (Go) programming language called Bchd. The new Golang implementation was originally built by Chris Pacia, the developer of the peer-to-peer marketplace Openbazaar. However, nine other developers stepped up and helped the programmer finish the beta release. Bchd is a fork of the Btcd protocol library and the client’s contributors have explained they waited until after the Nov. 15 fork to release the beta version. Even so, the developers ran the Bchd client throughout the upgrade and detailed that the implementation “operated incredibly smooth right through the fork.”

“We’ve implemented all four of the Bitcoin Cash hard forks and removed a major soft fork (Segwit) from the codebase — This release contains a number of features and improvements over Btcd including a UTXO memory cache, prune mode, and BIP159 Node_Network_Limited to allow pruned nodes to offer blockchain services to the network,” explained the Bchd beta launch announcement.

There are a bunch of benefits to the Bchd client as it can be pruned and still service Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) clients. In fact, Bchd is the only library that supports BIP157/158 NODE_CF, which maintains a compact filter index for SPV clients. “This allows developers to build a new type of P2P SPV wallet that uses client-side filtering to provide SPV users with unmatched privacy,” detailed the Bchd development team.

The Bchd developers continued:

To that end we’ve also ported the Neutrino wallet backend to BCH so we actually have an SPV wallet that makes use of this functionality — At present it’s the most private SPV codebase on the market — There really isn’t a close second in terms of privacy.

The Bchd Package Contains Three Interconnected Protocols

The news also follows another Golang BCH implementation written by the creators of the Counterparty.cash protocol. The Gocoin-cash protocol is a port of the BTC software originally written by Piotr Narewski. Further, another developer recently announced a BCH library written in the programming language Rust on Nov. 5. The Bitcoin Cash network now has a wide variety of full node client implementations in various programming languages.

The Bchd beta version package consists three pieces of software: Bchd, the Bchd wallet, and Bchctl. The Bchd implementation does not have a native wallet like traditional C++ implementations do. Meanwhile, Bchctl is a command line interface so users can control the Bchd node and wallet. In addition to this, the binaries are available in many options including Solaris, Plan 9, and BSD operating systems. “Please keep in mind this is beta software and probably not ready for production usage, though it is in pretty good shape right now,” the Bchd development team concluded.

What do you think about the Bchd client for the Bitcoin Cash network? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Images via Pixabay, Bchd, Shutterstock, and the Gopher Golang logo.

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