Ameow is a toy cryptocurrency. It was made as a hobby project and named by its author's girlfriend.

This project doesn't aim to be a robust and full-featured cryptocurrency. I made it just to see how the technology works. You can build it, run it on some servers, mine some coins and even sends those coins to your friends. You can take a look at the source code to see what's under the hood. But in the end, it is just for fun.

By the way, 1/100,000,000 of an AMEOW is called a nekoshi.

Many aspects of cryptocurrency have been simplified to help speeding up the development and comprehension of the project.

• AmeowCoin uses Proof-of-Work with SHA256 as the hashing algorithm.
• Difficulty of a block is the number of leading 0 bits in the hash.
• Block time distance is based on block height.
• Block reward starts at 64 AMEOW and is cut in halves every 10,000 blocks.
• Transaction fee is fixed at 0.5 AMEOW per transaction.
• Block has a maximum of 32 transactions.
• Transaction has a maximum of 32 inputs.
• Network and storage representation is JSON.
• Blockchain conflicts are solved in a keep-it-simple-stupid way.
• NO SECURITY.

This is the core library.

Below are some notable classes and namespaces:

• App: the application core.
• ChainManager: the blockchain.
• Pow: the Proof-of-Work helper class.
• Config: coin configurations.
• Wallet: wallet manager.
• Network namespace: TCP communication between nodes.
• Storage namespace: loading and storing of blocks and transactions.

The command-line interactive client.

The Windows Forms client.

The project source code is written in C# 9 and built using Visual Studio 2019.

Current target framework is .NET 5, which can be downloaded from https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download.

Ameow and AmeowCLI supports: Windows, Linux, MacOS (not tested yet).

AmeowGUI supports Windows only, for obvious reasons.

There should be a file named peers.txt in the same directory of the executable files. This file contains addresses of seed nodes.

Sample content:

100.100.100.100:6789
200.200.200.200:6789

The client support the following parameters:

• -p or --port: port for listening to remote peers. If this parameter exists, the client will not enable interactive mode.

• --log: log mode, accepts file (default), console and both.

Examples:

# run as a normal client with interactive prompt
./ameow-cli

# run as a node at port 6789
./ameow-cli -p 6789

# run as a node and print logs to terminal only
./ameow-cli -p 6789 --log console

When running with interactive mode, enter help for more information.

Currently a very basic GUI client with only Send and Mine features. You will easily know how to use it.

If you find something that can be fixed or improved, please feel free to open an issue or send a pull request. I will reply when I have some free time.

If you contribute code to this project, you are implicitly allowing your code to be distributed under the MIT license. You are also implicitly verifying that all code is your original work.