# btc-crawl

Bitcoin node network crawler (written in golang).

This is a for-fun project to explore the Bitcoin protocol and network.

Current status: 
* It crawls with all kinds of nice parameters but stores everything in memory
  until dumping a giant JSON blob at the end.
* ~~It crawls from hard-coded values and spits a bunch of stuff to
stdout.~~


## Usage

```
$ go get github.com/shazow/btc-crawl
$ btc-crawl --help
...
$ btc-crawl --concurrency 100 --output btc-crawl.json --verbose
...
```

**Estimated crawl time:** Unknown.

There should be under 10,000 active network nodes at any given time, according
to [bitnodes.io](https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/). Each node returns around ~2,500
known nodes, but usually only several have timestamps within the last hour.


## Todo

(In approximate order of priority)

* Add some sensible non-verbose output
* Apply peer-age filter to results
* Stream JSON rather than accumulate into a giant array.
* Add timeout option.
* Graceful cleanup on Ctrl+C
* Namespace packages properly (outside of `main`)


## License

MIT (see LICENSE file).