This project is barely maintained
For a more modern alternative, see pushtx.
This is a stand-alone P2P transaction submission tool.
The motivation for this command is the -walletbroadcast=0 command introduced
in Bitcoin Core 0.11 (see the release notes.)
This tool uses python-bitcoinlib, which can be installed using:
pip3 install --user python-bitcoinlib
Alternatively, to go without installing anything, clone the git repository and symlink the bitcoin directory inside into the root of this repository.
usage: bitcoin-submittx [-h] [--proxy PROXY] [--timeout TIMEOUT] [--no-color]
[--nodes-file NODES_FILE] [--tx-file TX_FILE]
NETWORK TXHEX [NODES ...]
Transaction submission tool
positional arguments:
NETWORK Network to connect to (mainnet, regtest, testnet).
This also determines the default port
TXHEX Serialized transactions to broadcast, separated by
commas
NODES Nodes to connect to, denoted either host or host:port
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--proxy PROXY, -p PROXY
SOCKS5 proxy to connect through
--timeout TIMEOUT, -t TIMEOUT
Number of seconds to wait before disconnecting from
nodes (default is 10)
--no-color Use no terminal color in output
--nodes-file NODES_FILE, -n NODES_FILE
Read list of nodes from file (format: one per line)
--tx-file TX_FILE, -r TX_FILE
Read list of transactions from file (format: one per
line)
The tool will connect to the provided nodes and announce the transactions. If the nodes subsequently request them within the timeout, they are sent.
The return status of the program will be 0 if at least one node requested the transaction, and 1 otherwise.
- Send the transaction as normal, either e.g. through RPC
sendtoaddressor the GUI
$ bitcoin-cli sendtoaddress mjqhocRebTHZRhkbkQs8Uzzb1T3GhEvEB4 0.25
f91948e5...
- Using the transaction hash, retrieve the transaction data through RPC using
gettransaction(NOTgetrawtransaction). Thehexfield of the result will contain the raw hexadecimal representation of the transaction
$ bitcoin-cli gettransaction f91948e5...
{
...
"txid": "f91948e5...",
...
"hex": "010000000..."
}
- Provide the
hexfield as TXHEX to this tool. e.g.
$ bitcoin-submittx mainnet '010000000...' 127.0.0.1
(normally one would not submit the transaction to the localhost node, but this is just an illustrative example)
A known issue is that bitcoin-submittx invs the wtxid instead of the txid, but when it sends the tx the node accepts it. This is probably not correct per BIP141. Patches welcome!
- Automatically fetch list of nodes to submit to
- possibly from DNS seeds (but this won't work behind Tor)
- IPv6 support
- Provide feedback of transaction reach, e.g. when connected to multiple nodes, it could monitor if the transaction comes back via another route.
- Tor stream isolation (like
-proxyrandomizein Bitcoin Core) - Multi-hop proxies, different proxy types?
- Feature to handle incoming connections: can be handy when submitting transactions to nodes that are not listening for e.g. testing
Some other projects that might be useful when working with bitcoin transactions at a low level:
- payment-proto-interface This is a simple (Python) application which allows you to interact with the Bitcoin payment protocol manually