Paymetheus

Paymetheus is a graphical Windows client for btcwallet developed by the btcsuite project. Unlike other btcwallet clients, Paymetheus was developed in conjunction with and uses the new btcwallet gRPC API. It is written using C# and WPF and targets .NET Framework 4.5.

At the moment, Paymetheus is only usable on the Bitcoin testnet network (version 3).

The program is intended to appear clean, modern, and be easy to use for a user unfamiliar with the technical details behind bitcoin. It also attempts to hide details that can be dangerous if used improperly. As an example, to avoid address reuse, addresses managed by the wallet are never displayed except when generating new addresses to receive a payment. Instead, the btcwallet BIP0044 account containing the address' corresponding key is displayed when viewing transaction history.

The btcwallet binary is started in the background by Paymetheus so it is not required to already have a running btcwallet to connect to. However, as btcwallet currently is only usable with btcd RPC (no SPV yet), a testnet3 btcd server must already be running. The connection details for this btcd server will be prompted for when Paymetheus starts.

While the entire program will only run on Windows (WPF is Windows-specific), a significant portion of the code not dealing with graphical layer (the Bitcoin and RPC code) is written in portable C# and should be reusable on any operating system.

Things are just getting started and there is much work left to do. Check out the project's Github issue tracker for known issues.

Building

No official binary release is available due to the project still being incomplete in many ways. To build from source:

1. Install the latest btcwallet master branch.

   PS> go get https://github.com/btcsuite/btcwallet
   

   Make sure the installed binary is the first to be found according to your PATH environment variable. Alternatively, this wallet binary can be copied to the Debug and/or Release bin Paymetheus directories so it will be used instead of another installed version of wallet.

2. Install Visual Studio 2015. In theory, standalone Roslyn, NuGet, and msbuild installs will also be sufficient to build the project, but this is untested. The 2015 Community edition of Visual Studio (free to use for open source projects) can be obtained here.

3. Clone the project repo and open the solution file in VS.

4. Click Debug -> Start Debugging (or press F5) to build and execute the program.

Testing

Paymetheus uses the xUnit.net test framework to define and execute test code and the OpenCover and ReportGenerator tools to report test line coverage. A PowerShell script is included to run these tests, but require the Paymetheus.Tests.Bitcoin project to be compiled first. From VS, using the Debug (not Release) solution configuration, build this project, and then run the script.

PS> & .\cover.ps1

Test coverage can be viewed in a web browser by navigating to .\coverage\index.htm.

License

Paymetheus is licensed under the liberal ISC License.