bitcoin-rs and rbitcoin
Two independent Rust full nodes. They do not share a repository, a storage model, or an author. Neither is a fork of Bitcoin Core.
BITCOIN-RS
gosunuts, Delving 28 Sep 2026, gosuda/bitcoin-rs, Apache-2.0. Independent in the way btcd is. The node owns the UTXO set used for validation, plus a read-only Esplora-compatible script index, so wallet queries need no separate Electrs. He calls it early work.
RBITCOIN
Brandon Black (reardencode),
v0.7.0 on 18 Sep 2026. Outputs and their spends live in one archive, with no separate UTXO database. Electrum and Esplora can run in the same process. The README says its first-party code is AI-written, by Grok, under his prompting.How Each Checks Agreement with Core
Both authors talk about checking agreement with Bitcoin Core rather than replacing it.
BITCOIN-RS
Script validation runs either in its own Rust code or through libbitcoinkernel, and the kernel path can cross-check the native one. He asks for review of the plan: the kernel as an oracle, bitcoinfuzz, and Core's qa-assets.
RBITCOIN
Pure-Rust consensus, with no libbitcoinconsensus. Functional tests, consensus tests, and differential fuzzing against Core check agreement.
SKIPPED SCRIPTS
rbitcoin skips historical script checks below block 840,000 by default, once the header chain has enough work;
--milestone 0 checks everything. Core does the same below its assumevalid block, 966,143 in v32. By default rbitcoin checks more history than Core does.QUESTION
An oracle check, an AI-written consensus engine, and an indexer in the same binary as validation: which of these would you want tested, and how, before pointing a wallet at the node?