Bitcoin Roots

Connected to the trunk. Conservative in policy. Neutral in consensus.

For an immediately usable binary release, see plan-b.foundation/bitcoin-roots.

What is Bitcoin Roots?

Bitcoin Roots connects to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network to download and fully validate blocks and transactions. It also includes a wallet and graphical user interface, which can be optionally built.

Bitcoin Roots is based on Bitcoin Core with selected policy features from the Bitcoin Knots 29.3.knots20260507 code line. The Knots reference describes feature lineage only; Bitcoin Core v29.4 is the direct base.

Bitcoin Roots remains compatible with Bitcoin Core consensus. Its conservative transaction relay and mempool policy is local and configurable: a transaction rejected by policy can still be consensus-valid, and valid blocks containing it remain acceptable. Bitcoin Roots does not enforce RDTS/BIP110 consensus rules.

For the selected Roots behavior available in this release, the follow-on work that is not yet shipped, and explicit non-features, see the Roots feature catalog.

Further information is available in the doc folder.

License

Bitcoin Roots is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more information or https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT.

Development Process

Bitcoin Roots follows Bitcoin Core development and incorporates suitable changes for each release. Features that improve node policy, resource control, privacy, or operation without changing Bitcoin consensus may also be maintained here.

The project distinguishes local policy from consensus. Transactions rejected by local relay or mempool policy may still be valid under Bitcoin consensus, and valid blocks containing them must continue to be accepted.

The contribution guide is CONTRIBUTING.md; developer guidance is in doc/developer-notes.md.

Testing

Testing and code review are essential for this security-critical project. Please help by testing other contributors' pull requests.

Automated Testing

Developers are strongly encouraged to write unit tests. Unit tests can be run with ctest; further details are in /src/test/README.md.

There are also regression and integration tests, written in Python. These tests can be run (if the test dependencies are installed) with: build/test/functional/test_runner.py (assuming build is your build directory).

Continuous integration should ensure that pull requests are built and tested on supported platforms.

Manual Quality Assurance (QA) Testing

Changes should be tested by somebody other than their author, especially when they are large or high-risk.

Maintenance

Bitcoin Roots is maintained by the Plan ₿ Foundation under the supervision of Denis "Jaromil" Roio, Giacomo Zucco, and S₿AM.

Translations

Do not manually edit generated translations; see the translation process.