jb55 on Nostr: Bitcoin tracing is a crazy idea I had back in 2019 and added to bitcoin in 2020[1]. ...
Bitcoin tracing is a crazy idea I had back in 2019 and added to bitcoin in 2020[1].
b10c (npub1kyx…c6vv) took the idea and fleshed it out[2] so its now actually useable now!
The basic idea is that you add "tracepoints" into the codebase, which are like ports you can plug into to monitor data flowing through it in realtime (connections, mempool changes, etc)
You can then build external tools that plug into these ports for monitoring. This is ideal so you don't have to get bogged down in core PRs when you want to add monitoring features.
bitcointap is one of these monitoring tools that leverages tracepoints. it will simply plug in and print the data out in a developer-friendly way.
[1]
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/19866[2]
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/tracing.md I am working on a new tool for bitcoin nodes, based on b10c (npub1kyx…c6vv) 's https://github.com/0xB10C/peer-observer work... I am forking it to create something a bit more hacker-friendly.
Introducing #bitcointap: a quick and easy way to tap into any bitcoin core node and extract traces in realtime
https://github.com/jb55/bitcointap
b10c (npub1kyx…c6vv) has done most of the hard work here. I am just making his tool a bit more unixy.
Published at
2025-05-10 16:38:32Event JSON
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"content": "Bitcoin tracing is a crazy idea I had back in 2019 and added to bitcoin in 2020[1]. nostr:npub1kyxqqqq8n2pu7f5pthr48zqcmr2k52vrud6wxzjpg0jsqcyhs3tshfc6vv took the idea and fleshed it out[2] so its now actually useable now!\n\nThe basic idea is that you add \"tracepoints\" into the codebase, which are like ports you can plug into to monitor data flowing through it in realtime (connections, mempool changes, etc)\n\nYou can then build external tools that plug into these ports for monitoring. This is ideal so you don't have to get bogged down in core PRs when you want to add monitoring features.\n\nbitcointap is one of these monitoring tools that leverages tracepoints. it will simply plug in and print the data out in a developer-friendly way.\n\n[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/19866\n[2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/tracing.md\nnostr:note1m2vvqryzprqrqv0thnyayawhjspalwnf5x3ufh0veq5s57t3dy0s8tv63c",
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