Getting Started with Libbitcoin

Libbitcoin is a system’s level C++ toolkit for programming with the Bitcoin Blockchain. It’s a highly modular framework and with a little practice it can be a great tool to implement privacy and security focused bitcoin features. In this multi-part series I’ll be going over some of the basics of the library.

First step is installation; I’ll be going over installation for Mac.

On Mac OSX, clang version >7 is required so go ahead and check it with:


$clang++ --version

After that you need to have the xcode toolchain installed. Easy enough with:

$ xcode-select --install

Next, you’ll need to use homebrew to install some of libbitcoin’s dependency stack with:

$ brew install autoconf automake libtool pkgconfig wget
$ brew install boost

After you have all the dependencies installed on your system you go ahead and clone the repo into a local directory:


$ git clone https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin.git

then checkout the latest version tag with git:

$ git checkout tags/v3.6.0 

and walk through the make file with autotools:


$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

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