Network Protocol

The protocol layer abstracts Bitcoin’s P2P network protocol, supporting multiple network variants. See Protocol Overview for details.

Protocol Abstraction

The blvm-protocol abstracts P2P message formats (standard Bitcoin wire protocol), connection management, peer discovery, block synchronization, and transaction relay. See Protocol Architecture for details.

Network Variants

Mainnet (BitcoinV1)

Production Bitcoin network
Full consensus rules
Real economic value

Testnet3

Bitcoin test network
Same consensus rules as mainnet
Different network parameters
No real economic value

Regtest

Regression testing network
Configurable difficulty
Isolated from other networks
Fast block generation for testing

For implementation details, see the blvm-protocol README.

Transport Abstraction Layer

The network layer uses multiple transport protocols through a unified abstraction (see Transport Abstraction):

NetworkManager
    └── Transport Trait (abstraction)
        ├── TcpTransport (Bitcoin P2P compatible)
        └── IrohTransport (QUIC-based, optional)

Transport Options

TCP Transport (Default): Bitcoin P2P protocol compatibility using traditional TCP sockets. Maintains Bitcoin wire protocol format and is compatible with standard Bitcoin nodes. See Transport Abstraction.

Iroh Transport: QUIC-based transport using Iroh for P2P networking with public key-based peer identity and NAT traversal support. See Transport Abstraction.

Transport Selection

Configure transport via node configuration:

[network]
transport_preference = "tcp_only"  # or "iroh_only", "hybrid"

Modes: tcp_only (default, Bitcoin compatible), iroh_only (experimental), hybrid (both simultaneously)

The protocol adapter serializes between blvm-consensus NetworkMessage types and transport-specific wire formats. The message bridge processes messages and generates responses. Default is TCP-only; enable Iroh via iroh feature flag.

BLVM Documentation