Sending transactions

In Chapter 5, Installing a Bitcoin Node, we used the Bitcoin node to build, sign, and broadcast a Bitcoin transaction using the createrawtransaction, signrawtransaction, and sendrawtransaction commands.

In this example, we'll perform the same operations but using Javascript and the BitcoinJS library. The process involves the same three steps:

1. Build a transaction with a list of inputs and outputs.

2. Sign the transaction with the required private keys.

3. Broadcast the transaction to the network.

Simple transactions

Using the bitcoinjs library, we will work with the TransactionBuilder object to construct a new transaction. We simply provide the object with one or more private keys as the source of our funds and with one or more addresses for the output, each with the amount we want to send.

Note

For the following examples, real bitcoin can be at stake. Make sure to have backups of your keys before experimenting with them.

In the following example, our script will prompt for the private...