LeCoin: One Coin to Rule Them All

LeCoin is a toy cryptocurrency modeled after Bitcoin. Its purpose is to practically educate us on blockchains and cryptocurrencies, and so it is not intended for the final product to be fully functional. It is named after LeBron James, the greatest basketball player of all time and king of the sport. We looked to his greatness to guide us through development.

Running Instructions

First, make sure Go is installed, and then build the project by running make clean all. To then run, simply use the command

util/vnet_run <config_dir>

or, to just use our pre-made configs,

util/vnet_run configs

The way this works is that in the configs directory you specify, you should have a set of JSON files with the following form

{
	"name": "host-1",
	"port": 8000,
	"args": ["miner"]
}

The args key can be either "miner" or "nonminer" to designate that host as a machine that should do mining. None of the hosts should have overlapping name or port.

After running util/vnet_run <config_dir> this will launch a tmux session where you can swap between host panes using the macro <Ctrl>B + O. Once the CLI is running, you can run help to see the available commands. We give an overview of these below

LeCoin Commands

• ss: create a transaction sending yourself 0.0 LeCoin. This needs to be done to get the blockchain going, with the miner who mines this first block getting the first LeCoin in circulation.
• balance: show your wallet (public key) plus balance
• list: list all known wallets and corresponding balances
• users: shows the index of each know wallet, usefel for the send command
• send <usr_idx> <amt>: send wallet indexed by usr_idx a transaction with amt LeCoins.