Recently there has been a resurgence of interest on cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and it looks like there is a steady influx of newcomers into the scene and eager to learn about it. I can really relate to all that, because this is the hottest sh*t since Watt’s steam engine. This post will be the first one in a series that explains how you can roll out your own cryptocoin for learning purposes, and for learning purposes only.

We will clone the source of Peercoin, the first coin to implement proof of stake. The pre-requisite for following my guide is a working knowledge of C++ programming and that you aren’t scared of linux terminal. I also assume that you’ve done your homework regarding Bitcoin and are familiar with some of the terminology. Rather than doing a coin cloning 101 guide, which been done many times already. I intend to follow up this with more posts explaining how the coin works internally.

Right, so you have Ubuntu or some other debian. No? Well grab one, I’ll wait.

Okay. You need to install dependencies.

sudo apt-get install git nano build-essential autoconf libssl-dev libboost-all-dev libdb++-dev libdb-dev --yes

Then go wherever you want the coin source to be; we’ll assume it is your home dir from now on, and get the source using Git:

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

Once that is done go to the source directory.

$ cd peercoin/src

then in src, you build the Peercoin client with

$ make -f makefile.unix USE_UPNP=-

The USE_UPNP=- is optional, it just disables peer discovery using universal plug’n’play, and we don’t need that for now.

Now, it may be that your compiling stopped abruptly, and you get a report like this:

makefile.unix:126: recipe for target 'obj/net.o' failed

No worries mate, just get down here with me for a sec and we’ll sort that out in an iffy.

Okay, here we are, back in the saddle - if the build was succesful, you ought to have ppcoind, the Peercoin daemon in the src directory. Let’s start that with

$ ./ppcoind -printtoconsole -debug

-printtoconsole will print out what the node is doing, and -debug will show some special messages, that can be useful.

After getting up and opening databases - we’ll get back to all this later - it will exit with a message about missing configuration file.

Go to your home directory.

$ cd

Open nano or some other text editor

$ nano .ppcoin/ppcoin.conf

and think of a password. Since we are testing, we can do with

rpcuser=rpc 
rpcpassword=pwd 
testnet=1

Just remember, if you were running a node out there in the wild (i.e. without setting the testnet flag), you’d like to replace the password with something reasonable (like a random string), but for now, this will suffice.

Again run the node, and this time it should keep up humming nicely. Next time we’ll have a closer look at what it is doing.

Here’s what to do if your build stopped with “recipe for target ‘obj/net.o’ failed”

Okay, the thing is that Peercoin seems to have been gathering dust ever since the last commit which was more than a year ago.

There is this silly little bug, and someone has made a pull request of it but no one has bothered to put that fix into the codebase. So we need to do it ourselves.

Take a look at the error report you got. Scroll a little upwards, and you should find this:

net.cpp:54:1: error: reference to ‘array’ is ambiguous
 array<int, THREAD_MAX> vnThreadsRunning;
 ^~~~~

There is this array, and now compiler is in trouble, because Boost and Standard libraries both have arrays in them, so which library to use? Well, this time a Boost array is needed. Let’s make that clear by declaring the namespace explicitly. Open net.cpp in an editor of your choice and go to line 54. Change it, so it reads

boost::array<int, THREAD_MAX> vnThreadsRunning;

Save and compile again (make -f makefile etc.) Now that ought to work. Silly little bug. Let’s get back to business