Note: This is for educational purposes, showing how to develop a cryptocurrency using C++20; it is not a real cryptocurrency. I wanted a new project to teach and also improve my own knowledge about C++20. This is combined with my love for cryptocurrency solving real-world problems that are in existing ones. Common problems are either the language chosen for the reference implementation are not performant enough e.g using GoLang (eth/avax), have fees (most cryptos) and most are not designed with performance in mind from the get-go and try to shoe horn optimizations in afterwards. People often quote VISA as peaking over 57K tps, crypto opens up a lot more doors for new innovation and most of the world does not even has access to this network. I believe over 1Million TPS is required for a fully automonous world.

Features include:

• Decentralized
• Instant - Finality will need to be reached very quickly
• Consensus mechanism - Novel
• Smart contracts
• User friendly - Requiring the underlying crypto to pay as a gas fee for interacting with smart contracts is very bad UX and makes onboarding users much more difficult (imagine scheduling nationwide voting system).
• DB driven design
• No serialization/deserialization required and many other features making use of the underling hardware architecture.
• Signature verification is moved outside to reduce compute load
• Sharding of the network to improve throughput

Note about install commands:

• for Windows, we use choco.
• for MacOS, we use brew.
• In case of an error in cmake, make sure that the dependencies are on the PATH.

1. A C++ compiler that supports C++20. See cppreference.com to see which features are supported by each compiler. The following compilers should work:

• gcc 11+

  Install command

  • Debian/Ubuntu:

      sudo apt install build-essential
    

  • MacOS:

      brew install gcc
    

• clang 11+

  Install command

  • Debian/Ubuntu:

      bash -c "$(wget -O - https://apt.llvm.org/llvm.sh)"
    

  • Windows:

    Visual Studio 2019 ships with LLVM (see the Visual Studio section). However, to install LLVM separately:

      choco install llvm -y
    

    llvm-utils for using external LLVM with Visual Studio generator:

      git clone https://github.com/zufuliu/llvm-utils.git
      cd llvm-utils/VS2017
      .\install.bat
    

  • MacOS:

      brew install llvm
    

• Visual Studio 2019 or higher

  Install command + Environment setup

  On Windows, you need to install Visual Studio 2019 because of the SDK and libraries that ship with it.

  Visual Studio IDE - 2019 Community (installs Clang too):

  choco install -y visualstudio2019community --package-parameters "add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.NativeDesktop --includeRecommended --includeOptional --passive --locale en-US"
  

  Put MSVC compiler, Clang compiler, and vcvarsall.bat on the path:

  	choco install vswhere -y
  	refreshenv
  	
  	$clpath = vswhere -latest -prerelease -find **/Hostx64/x64/*   # for x64
  	[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", $env:Path + ";$clpath", "User")
  	
  	$clangpath = vswhere -latest -prerelease -find **/Llvm/bin/*
  	[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", $env:Path + ";$clangpath", "User")
  
  	$vcvarsallpath =  vswhere -latest -prerelease -find **/Auxiliary/Build/*
  	[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", $env:Path + ";$vcvarsallpath", "User")
  	refreshenv
  

2. Conan

   Install Command

   • Via pip - https://docs.conan.io/en/latest/installation.html#install-with-pip-recommended

       pip install --user conan
     

   • Windows:

       choco install conan -y
     

   • MacOS:

       brew install conan
     

3. CMake 3.15+

   Install Command

   • Debian/Ubuntu:

       sudo apt-get install cmake
     

   • Windows:

       choco install cmake -y
     

   • MacOS:

       brew install cmake
     

• Doxygen

  Install Command

  • Debian/Ubuntu:

      sudo apt-get install doxygen
      sudo apt-get install graphviz
    

  • Windows:

      choco install doxygen.install -y
      choco install graphviz -y
    

  • MacOS:

      brew install doxygen
      brew install graphviz
    

Make a build directory:

mkdir build
cd build

By default (if you don't set environment variables CC and CXX), the system default compiler will be used.

Conan and CMake use the environment variables CC and CXX to decide which compiler to use. So to avoid the conflict issues only specify the compilers using these variables.

CMake will detect which compiler was used to build each of the Conan targets. If you build all of your Conan targets with one compiler, and then build your CMake targets with a different compiler, the project may fail to build.

cmake ..

with the CMake Curses Dialog Command Line tool:

ccmake -S . -B ./build

Once ccmake has finished setting up, press 'c' to configure the project, press 'g' to generate, and 'q' to quit.

Once you have selected all the options you would like to use, you can build the project (all targets):

cmake --build ./build

For Visual Studio, give the build configuration (Release, RelWithDeb, Debug, etc) like the following:

cmake --build ./build -- /p:configuration=Release

Many problems that users have can be resolved by updating Conan, so if you are having any trouble with this project, you should start by doing that.

To update conan:

$ pip install --user --upgrade conan 

You may need to use pip3 instead of pip in this command, depending on your platform.

If you continue to have trouble with your Conan dependencies, you can try clearing your Conan cache:

$ conan remove -f '*'

The next time you run cmake or cmake --build, your Conan dependencies will be rebuilt. If you aren't using your system's default compiler, don't forget to set the CC, CXX, CMAKE_C_COMPILER, and CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER variables, as described in the 'Build using an alternate compiler' section above.