Bitcoin tracing is a crazy idea I had back in 2019 and added to bitcoin in 2020[1]. nostr:npub1kyxqqqq8n2pu7f5pthr48zqcmr2k52vrud6wxzjpg0jsqcyhs3tshfc6vv took the idea and fleshed it out[2] so its now actually useable now!

The basic idea is that you add "tracepoints" into the codebase, which are like ports you can plug into to monitor data flowing through it in realtime (connections, mempool changes, etc)

You can then build external tools that plug into these ports for monitoring. This is ideal so you don't have to get bogged down in core PRs when you want to add monitoring features.

bitcointap is one of these monitoring tools that leverages tracepoints. it will simply plug in and print the data out in a developer-friendly way.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/19866

[2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/tracing.md

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