Monthly Archives: January 2016

Decred, testnet

Decred Testnet: Binaries, Code and Docs

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I am pleased to announce that Decred testnet is going live today, Wednesday, January 27th. Decred testnet is intended to be used as a sandbox for testing the various features and behavior of Decred. Interested parties are now free to experiment on testnet with:

  • Sending and receiving transactions
  • PoW mining software, e.g. cgminer
  • PoS mining with dcrwallet
  • Writing or porting software for Decred

Decred testnet

Decred testnet

We are releasing the following binaries:

  • dcrd – the chain daemon
  • dcrwallet – the wallet daemon
  • dcrctl – the command line RPC tool
  • cgminer – mining software

The dcrd, dcrwallet and dcrctl binaries are provided for both 32 and 64-bit versions of the following OSes: Windows, OS X, Linux, DragonflyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. CGminer is provided as a binary for 32 and 64-bit Windows and Linux.

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Bitcoin, btcwallet

Paymetheus: A Windows Bitcoin Wallet

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Paymetheus screenshot

Early Paymetheus screenshot. Can you spot the bug?

The btcsuite project started out of a desire to create high quality and usable Bitcoin tools and libraries. Early on, it was decided that Go, a type-safe and portable language, would be used. Go has been a great tool for us, but one sticking point has been the area of native graphical frontends for our software. Some previous attempts were made to write GUIs in Go, but the user experience always suffered in one way or another.

We still wanted to provide a nice graphical interface to our software that a user would enjoy using. To solve this issue, we took the pragmatic approach of developing native GUIs with languages well supported by their respective operating systems.

Paymetheus is the first result of this development. It is a Bitcoin wallet for the Windows 7/8.1/10 operating systems written in C# and WPF. Paymetheus reuses much of our existing Go code by using RPC to communicate with btcwallet under the covers. Like all of our open source software, it is freely available under the ISC License.

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