Elements code tutorial
Installing Bitcoin
First we will install Bitcoin on the machine. This will allow us to demonstrate how the Federated 2-Way Peg works in Elements later on in the tutorial. It is not required if you intend to use Elements as a standalone blockchain, but to fully understand the features available in Elements it is a good idea to follow along anyway. It doesn’t take long to install Bitcoin using the commands below and we will be running in “regtest” mode, so there is no blockchain to sync.
You can download the compiled libraries from the Bitcoin Core Download page. Make sure you download the binaries, SHA256SUMS and SHA256SUMS.asc file.
Open a terminal and change your directory to the one containing the files downloaded above. If you are using ~Downloads this becomes
cd ~/Downloads/
Verify the hash:
sha256sum --ignore-missing --check SHA256SUMS
Verify that the download is signed by a bitcoin-core maintainer. The bitcoin-source contains a list of reputable keys. The snippet below shows how to verify the signature for one of them.
gpg --keyserver hkps://keys.openpgp.org --recv-keys E777299FC265DD04793070EB944D35F9AC3DB76A
gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.asc
You might get a warning that the key is not certified. This means that to fully verify your download you should also confirm the signing key’s fingerprint.
The next step is to install the actual binaries. Assuming you are installing version 22.0 this becomes.
tar -xf <path-to-downloaded-file>.tar.gz
sudo install -m 0755 -o root -g root -t /usr/local/bin bitcoin-22.0/bin/*
Check that the install worked:
which bitcoind
Which should return:
That means that the Bitcoin software was installed. We will run it later so let’s move on with getting Elements set up.