In the one of the the last posts in this series, we have been able to successfully verify an existing bitcoin transaction. With the understanding of how this works, we should now be able to conversely create a transaction from scratch, sign it and publish it in the bitcoin network.
Given an amount that we want to transfer and the target, we will first need to determine unspent transaction outputs which are available and select those UTXOs that we will be using. This process is called coin selection. Coin selection is a non-trivial task, as it needs to consider several variables like the number of coins in your wallet, the size of the resulting transaction, and the required fee to make sure that the transaction is picked up and included in a block by a miner. In the bitcoin reference implementation, coin selection is done in the method CWallet::SelectCoins in the file wallet.cpp. The logic is nicely described in this post on StackExchange. Essentially, it will first try to spend all those outputs that are smaller than the target amount. If that does not give an exact match, it will try to find a single output larger than the target amount. Otherwise, it will select a random subset of those outputs smaller than the target. Other algorithms exists, and I even found a masters thesis on this on the web (see [2]).
For our purpose, we will implement an easier algorithm that I have seen in the excellent book [1]. Again, we will be using the btc package that is available in my GitHub repository. The first thing that we do is to retrieve a list of all unspent transaction outputs that our wallet knows. To do this, we again use the RPC interface to access the wallet built into the bitcoin core client and call the method listunspent. We then split the resulting list of coins in two lists – one containing all entries smaller than the amount to spend, the other one containing all other entries.
#
# First we make an RPC call to retrieve unspent transaction output and
# select the outputs that we are going to spend
#
listunspent = btc.utils.rpcCall("listunspent")
#
# Now extract transaction IDs and store that in a list of
# dictionaries
#
# We split this list into one list of entries that are greater
# than the amount we want to transfer and one list of entries
# that are smaller
#
#
smaller = []
greater = []
amount_to_spend = float(args.amount)
for _ in listunspent:
if _['spendable']:
txid = _['txid']
vout = _['vout']
amount = float(_['amount'])
address = _['address']
coin = {'txid': txid,
'vout': vout,
'amount': amount,
'address' : address}
if amount > amount_to_spend:
greater.append(coin)
else:
smaller.append(coin)
Next we sort these two lists and build a list to_be_spent of those coins that we want to spend. If there is a coin that is greater than the amount to be spend, we take this entry and are done. If not, we try to sum up available coins from the other list to reach our target sum.
#
# Next we sort the lists.
#
greater.sort(key=lambda entry: entry['amount'])
smaller.sort(key=lambda entry: entry['amount'], reverse=True)
#
# If greater is not emtpy, take the smallest (i.e. now first)
# element
#
if len(greater) > 0:
amount_funded = greater[0]['amount']
to_be_spent = [greater[0]]
else:
#
# We need to combine more than one transaction output
#
to_be_spent = []
amount_funded = 0
for _ in smaller:
if amount_funded < amount_to_spend:
to_be_spent.append(_)
amount_funded += _['amount']
if (amount_funded < amount_to_spend):
# Failed, clean up list
to_be_spent = []
Now that we have selected the UTXOs that we will use to build our transaction, we need to retrieve the corresponding private keys so that we can use them for the needed signatures. At the same time, we will build a list of the transaction outputs that we use in our standard format (i.e. as Python objects).
txos = []
privateKeys = []
for _ in to_be_spent:
tx = btc.txn.txn()
raw = btc.utils.rpcCall("getrawtransaction", [_['txid']])
tx.deserialize(raw)
#
# Get private key using again an RPC call
#
privKey = btc.utils.rpcCall("dumpprivkey", [_['address']])
privKey = btc.keys.wifToPayloadBytes(privKey)
privKey = int.from_bytes(privKey, "big")
privateKeys.append(privKey)
txos.append(tx.getOutputs()[_['vout']])
We can now assemble our transaction. We will only use one transaction output for simplicity. WARNING: this will imply that the difference between the amount represented by our unspent transaction outputs and the amount that we want to transfer counts as fees and will be lost! In our example, we use an UTXO worth 30 bitcoin and transfer only one bitcoin, i.e. we will loose almost 29 bitcoin which is almost 30 kUSD at the current bitcoin / USD exchange rate! So do not do this with real bitcoin.
Here is the code to assemble our transaction.
#
# Next we create our transaction. First we create the transaction
# inputs. We leave the signature scripts empty for the time
# being
#
txn = btc.txn.txn()
for _ in to_be_spent:
txin = btc.txn.txin(prevTxid = _['txid'], vout = _['vout'])
txn.addInput(txin)
#
# Next we do the outputs. For the time being, we use only one output
# So we need to convert the address to a public key hash
#
publicKeyHash = btc.keys.ecAddressToPKH(args.target)
publicKeyHash = binascii.hexlify(publicKeyHash).decode('ascii')
#
# Create locking script
#
lockingScript = btc.script.scriptPubKey(scriptType = btc.script.SCRIPTTYPE_P2PKH,
pubKeyHash = publicKeyHash)
#
# and output
#
txout = btc.txn.txout(value = int(amount_to_spend * 100000000),
scriptPubKey = lockingScript)
txn.addOutput(txout)
Next we need to sign our transaction, i.e. we need to go through all transaction inputs and add the correct signatures. We already know how to do this – simply revert the process that we have studied in my previous post. I have put the required code into the function signTransaction in the module btc.script. The only subtlety that we have to observe is that the ECDSA signature algorithm might return a pair (r,s) where s is greater than n/2 – such a signature would be rejected by the bitcoin client (see the check in interpreter.cpp/IsLowDERSignature). Therefore we need to replace s by n – s if needed. With this function, signing and sending is now very easy.
#
# Sign it
#
txn = btc.script.signTransaction(txn, txos, privateKeys)
#
# and send it
#
raw = txn.serialize()
s = btc.utils.rpcCall("sendrawtransaction", [raw, True])
print("Done, resulting transaction ID: ")
print(s)
Now let us actually run this and try it out. To be a bit more realistic, we will first create a third node called Bob in our test network. Using our stored containers, this is very easy. We can use the following command to bring up a container called Bob and – in addition – an instance of our previously created Alice container.
$ docker run -d --rm -p 18332:18332 --name=alice alice $ docker run -it --rm --name=bob bitcoin-alpine
Now let us add a new address to Bob’s wallet that we will use as target address for our transaction. We can use the bitcoin-cli client if we first attach to the container bob
$ docker exec -it bob sh # bitcoin-cli --rpcuser=user --rpcpassword=password -regtest getnewaddress "Bob" n37U5uEL2h9FcZbumpoAxNYT9ACGjZCkCi
The output is the new address that we have just generated. If you now run the listaccounts command in the same terminal, you will see the newly created account and its balance which is still zero.
Now switch back to a terminal on your host. Clone my repository and run the script SendMoney.
$ git clone http://www.github.com/christianb93/bitcoin.git $ cd bitcoin $ python SendMoney.py --target=n37U5uEL2h9FcZbumpoAxNYT9ACGjZCkCi
Note that the argument --target is the newly created address. We are now almost done, but two steps remain. First, we will again have to connect our two nodes. As in the previous post, run docker network inspect bridge to find out the IP address of the node alice on the bridge network. In my case, this is again 172.17.0.2. Then reattach the terminal to the container bob and connect to this peer.
$ docker exec -it bob sh # bitcoin-cli --rpcuser=user --rpcpassword=password -regtest addnode "172.17.0.2" add
Finally, we need to include our newly created transaction in the blockchain, i.e. we have to go through the process of mining again. For the sake of simplicity, we will use the container of Alice as its port 18332 is mapped into the host network and so we can reach it from our host and use the bitcoin CLI client there. So on the host (!) open a terminal and run
$ bitcoin-cli --rpcuser=user --rpcpassword=password -regtest generate 6
As a result, you should see the IDs of the six newly created blocks. Now let us switch back to the terminal attached to Bob and check the balance.
# bitcoin-cli --rpcuser=user --rpcpassword=password -regtest listaccounts
{
"": 0.00000000,
"Bob": 1.00000000
}
Aaaahh, the sweet taste of success – we made it. Our transaction has been accepted by the network, enclosed into a block and correctly interpreted by Bobs node as contributing one bitcoin to his balance.
This post completes our in-depth analysis of transactions in the bitcoin blockchain. With the next post, we will switch our focus and start to investigate the process of mining and the structure of blocks in detail.
1. A. Antonopoulos, Mastering Bitcoin, O’Reilly 2015
2. M. Erhardt, An evaluation of coin selection strategies, Masters Thesis, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, available at this URL
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