Introduction

The Developer Reference aims to provide technical details and API information to help you start building Bitcoin-based applications, but it is not a specification. To make the best use of this documentation, you may want to install the current version of Bitcoin Core, either from source or from a pre-compiled executable.

In the following documentation, some strings have been shortened or wrapped: “[…]” indicates extra data was removed, and lines ending in a single backslash “\” are continued below. If you hover your mouse over a paragraph, cross-reference links will be shown in blue. If you hover over a cross-reference link, a brief definition of the term will be displayed in a tooltip.

Not A Specification

The Bitcoin.org Developer Documentation describes how Bitcoin works to help educate new Bitcoin developers, but it is not a specification—and it never will be.

The only correct specification of consensus behavior is the actual behavior of programs on the network which maintain consensus. As that behavior is subject to arbitrary inputs in a large variety of unique environments, it cannot ever be fully documented here or anywhere else.

In addition, we also warn you that this documentation has not been extensively reviewed by Bitcoin experts and so likely contains numerous errors. At the bottom of the menu on the left, you will find links that allow you to report an issue or to edit the documentation on GitHub. Please use those links if you find any errors or important missing information.