How do I get set up on Signet?

Question

I have heard about Signet here and here.

How do I get set up on Signet?

Answer 1

I will assume that you want to get set up on the default Signet that is administered by Kalle Alm and AJ Towns. (You can also set up your own custom Signet network and administer it yourself but the following instructions won't apply.)

Signet was merged into Bitcoin Core in PR 18267 in September 2020 and was first included in the 0.21 release.

Build instructions for Bitcoin Core are here (Windows, Mac OS, Linux).

Once you have built Bitcoin Core 0.21 or later you can use the -signet flag to run a Signet node:

bitcoind -daemon -signet

To create a Signet wallet:

bitcoin-cli -signet createwallet "insert_wallet_name"

If you want to play around with Taproot descriptors you will need to create a descriptor wallet. (Unless you specify you want a descriptor wallet it won't create one.)

./bitcoin-cli -signet -named createwallet wallet_name=insert_wallet_name descriptors=true

Then to generate a Signet address:

bitcoin-cli -signet -rpcwallet=insert_wallet_name getnewaddress

At the time of writing (July 2021) this will generate a Signet SegWit v0 bech32 address starting tb1q...

To obtain some Signet Bitcoin there is a Signet faucet here: https://signetfaucet.com/

You can track Signet transactions with the Signet block explorer here: https://explorer.bc-2.jp/

You can run a Signet node in parallel with your mainnet node like you can with a testnet node.

For more details see Kalle's workshop at Advancing Bitcoin 2020 that shows you how to make Taproot transactions on Signet and debug Taproot scripts using Kalle's Bitcoin script debugger btcdeb. (Beware that the workshop is from before Signet was merged into Bitcoin Core, so some of the details are outdated.)

There is a list of signet resources in this issue from openoms.