tbcd

🌐 Hemi Tiny Bitcoin Daemon (tbcd)

tbcd is a minimal Bitcoin block downloader and indexer daemon. It is designed to wrap the tbc service, which provides Bitcoin data (blocks and transactions) for other applications. Primarily, it functions as a network RPC endpoint.

🖥️ System Requirements

tbcd requires significant system resources due to its functionality:

Requirement	Specification
CPU Cores	4 minimum
RAM	12 GiB minimum
Disk	NVMe recommended

As of June 2025:

• testnet3 requires approximately 400 GiB of disk space.
• testnet4 requires approximately 10 GiB of disk space.
• mainnet requires over 1000 GiB of disk space.

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🛠️ Building tbcd From Source

🏁 Prerequisites

Ensure Go v1.25 or newer is installed on your system.

Using Makefile

To build tbcd using the provided Makefile

🏁 Prerequisites

Ensure make is installed on your system.

Build tbcd binary

cd heminetwork

# Output binary will be written to bin/tbcd or bin/tbcd.exe
make tbcd

Standalone Build

If you prefer not to use the Makefile:

cd heminetwork

# Build the binary (output will be tbcd or tbcd.exe)
go build ./cmd/tbcd/

# Install the binary (output will be in your GOBIN directory)
go install ./cmd/tbcd/

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🌐 Environment Settings

tbcd checks system limits at startup on supported platforms to ensure that they are set to values that will allow TBC to run without failing.

Warning

If you see an error similar to the following, you will need to adjust the limits for the number of open files, memory and the maximum stack size on your system to run TBC.

ulimit: memory: limit too low got X, want X

Changing limits is OS-specific, but can usually be done using the ulimit command.

⚙️ Runtime Settings

tbcd is designed to be run in cloud environments, as such it uses environment variables for runtime settings.

To see a full list of runtime settings, execute tbcd with the --help flag:

./bin/tbcd --help
# Hemi Tiny Bitcoin Daemon: v0.1.0-pre+3eb1bab15
# Usage:
#         help (this help)
# Environment:
#         TBC_ADDRESS           : address port to listen on (default: localhost:8082)
#         TBC_AUTO_INDEX        : enable auto utxo and tx indexes (default: true)
#         TBC_BLOCK_SANITY      : enable/disable block sanity checks before inserting (default: false)
#         TBC_LEVELDB_HOME      : data directory for leveldb (default: ~/.tbcd)
#         TBC_LOG_LEVEL         : loglevel for various packages; INFO, DEBUG and TRACE (default: tbcd=INFO;tbc=INFO;level=INFO)
#         TBC_MAX_CACHED_TXS    : maximum cached utxos and/or txs during indexing (default: 1000000)
#         TBC_NETWORK           : bitcoin network; mainnet or testnet3 (default: mainnet)
#         TBC_PROMETHEUS_ADDRESS: address and port tbcd prometheus listens on

Start the server by running:

/path/to/tbcd

👉 RPC Commands

The tbcd daemon runs an RPC server that listens on the address provided by the TBC_ADDRESS environment variable.

The RPC protocol is WebSocket-based and uses a standard request/response model.

Read more about the RPC protocol and available commands.