The Bitcoin Operations Technology Group (Optech) works to bring the best open source technologies and techniques to Bitcoin-using businesses in order to lower costs and improve customer experiences.

An initial focus for the group is working with its member organizations to reduce transaction sizes and minimize the effect of subsequent transaction fee increases.

Long-term goals include providing documentation and training materials, a weekly newsletter, original research, and facilitating improved relations between businesses and the open source community.

Optech does not exist to make a profit, and all materials and documentation produced are placed in the public domain. We are supported by our generous founding sponsors and contributions from member companies.

If you're an engineer or manager at a Bitcoin company or an open source contributor and you'd like to be a part of this, please contact us at [email protected].

To build the site, you need to go through a one-time installation procedure that takes 15 to 30 minutes. After that you can build the site an unlimited number of times with no extra work.

You also can choose to build the site locally by docker, click here to get a guide.

Install RVM

Install RVM using either the easy instructions or the more secure instructions.

Read the instructions printed to your console during setup to enable the rvm command in your shell. After installation, you need to run the following command:

source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm

Install Ruby

To install Ruby 2.6.4, simply run this command:

rvm install 2.6.4

Sometimes this will find a pre-compiled Ruby package for your Linux distribution, but sometimes it will need to compile Ruby from scratch (which takes about 15 minutes).

After Ruby 2.6.4 is installed, make it your default Ruby:

rvm alias create default ruby-2.6.4

And tell your system to use it:

rvm use default

(Note: you can use a different default Ruby, but if you ever change your default Ruby, you must re-run the gem install bundle command described below before you can build the site. If you ever receive a "eval: bundle: not found" error, you failed to re-run gem install bundle.)

Install Bundle

When you used RVM to install Ruby, it also installed the gem program. Use that program to install bundle:

gem install bundle

Install the Ruby dependencies

Change directory to the top-level of your local repository (replace bitcoinops.github.io with the full path to your local repository clone):

cd bitcoinops.github.io

And install the necessary dependencies using Bundle:

bundle install

Some of the dependencies can take a long time to install on some systems, so be patient.

Once Bundle completes successfully, you can preview or build the site.

To preview the website in your local browser, make sure you're in the bitcoinops.github.io directory and run the following command:

make preview

This will build the site and then print a message like this:

Server address: http://0.0.0.0:4000
Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

Visit the indicated URL in your browser to view the site.

To build the site exactly like we do for the deployment server, make sure you're in the bitcoinops.github.io directory and run:

make

The resulting HTML for the entire site will be placed in the _site directory and various tests will be run.

If you would like to contribute to the Bitcoin Optech project, please review the contributing guidelines.