BCH Testnet Environment

In order to test the BCH network before the hardforks it's useful to have a controlled enviroment to replicate the network behavior.

Environment

The environment consists of a bitcoin-abc + bitcore patches, a blockexplorer, an insight-api, a mining pool and a miner.

After following the guide all the environment components will be running on your system.

Requirements

• A Debian PC or VM. (The guide will use Debian commands to install the dependencies. This could run on any system that supports ABC, but you'll have to adapt the installation instructions)

• Al least 30 Gb of free space to store the testnet blockchain.

Components

• The system will use a Bitcoin ABC + bitcore patches to download the blockchain. This bitcore patches are new indexes that allow to request detailed information to the blockchain via RPC.

• Bitcore will request the bitcoin node the blockchain information. With this information the insight (blockcexplorer) and insight-api can be used.

• In order to mine the chain a mining pool will organize all the miners and will generate blocks using the GetBlockTemplate call to a bitcoin node.

• When the mining pool is ready, a CPU Miner is used to mine some blocks. Testnet difficulty is reseted every 20min without blocks, so even slow systems can mine some blocks.

Steps

1. Install and configure BitcoinABC + bitcore.

2. Install and configure bitcore + insight + insight-api.

3. Install and configure NOMP (mining pool).

4. Install and configure cpuminer.

5. Make your own fork.

TODOs

Missing features that I'll add in the future.

• Testnet Faucet installation guide.

• Bitcore Wallet Services installation guide.

• Copay/Bitpay installation guide.