Broadcast Nonstandard Txs Quickly [Bitcoin]

NB: This document is better read from github, due to fomatting issues with the code.

So, I recently wanted to broadcast a nonstandard tx and didn’t want to wait for full blockchain sync on my dev machine.

I knew that Eligius supports the Free Tx Relay Policy, and that I’d sent them nonstandard txs before, but all the IPs I could find weren’t accepting connections. Finally I found 68.168.105.168 and was able to connect and broadcast the message. Later I realised you can search getaddr.bitnodes.io for ‘eligius’ to find nodes.

This is a great start, but we still need to send the transaction. By default Bitcoin Core does not relay transactions that:

• Are nonstandard
• Contain outputs not in the current UTXO set

At this point we are going to need to compile a version of Bitcoin Core. We will need to address the above two problems to broadcast a transaction. The second problem is included so we don’t have to download the whole blockchain, allowing us to relay pretty much anything.

The first section of code to change is IsStandard() in script\standard.cpp. Source Link. The quickest way to fix this is add a return true; at the top of the function like so:

bool IsStandard(const CScript& scriptPubKey, txnouttype& whichType)
{
    return true;
    vector<valtype> vSolutions;
    if (!Solver(scriptPubKey, whichType, vSolutions))
    <snip>

Sweet, now all transactions are standard for our node. The next part is to relay transactions even when we can’t validate the outputs they spend. When troubleshooting before I ran into this error message being thrown. To avoid more debugging I figured the best thing to do was just rip the whole block of code out. That is to say this:

<snip>
    bool fHaveChain = existingCoins && existingCoins->nHeight < 1000000000;
    if (!fHaveMempool && !fHaveChain) {
        // push to local node and sync with wallets
        CValidationState state;
        bool fMissingInputs;
        if (!AcceptToMemoryPool(mempool, state, tx, false, &fMissingInputs, !fOverrideFees)) {
            if (state.IsInvalid()) {
                throw JSONRPCError(RPC_TRANSACTION_REJECTED, strprintf("%i: %s", state.GetRejectCode(), state.GetRejectReason()));
            } else {
                if (fMissingInputs) {
                    throw JSONRPCError(RPC_TRANSACTION_ERROR, "Missing inputs");
                }
                throw JSONRPCError(RPC_TRANSACTION_ERROR, state.GetRejectReason());
            }
        }
    } else if (fHaveChain) {
        throw JSONRPCError(RPC_TRANSACTION_ALREADY_IN_CHAIN, "transaction already in block chain");
    }
    RelayTransaction(tx);
<snip>

Becomes this:

<snip>
    bool fHaveChain = existingCoins && existingCoins->nHeight < 1000000000;
    RelayTransaction(tx);
<snip>

So, all that’s left to do is compile bitcoind, run it with -connect=68.168.105.168, wait for the connection to initialize (which can be checked with bitcoin-cli getpeerinfo) and then sendrawtransaction when you’ve confirmed the connection. If all goes well the tx will appear in the next eligius block!