Appendix E. pycoin, ku, and tx

The Python library pycoin, originally written and maintained by Richard Kiss, is a Python-based library that supports manipulation of bitcoin keys and transactions, even supporting the scripting language enough to properly deal with nonstandard transactions.

The pycoin library supports both Python 2 (2.7.x) and Python 3 (3.3 and later) and comes with some handy command-line utilities, ku and tx.

Key Utility (KU)

The command-line utility ku (“key utility”) is a Swiss Army knife for manipulating keys. It supports BIP-32 keys, WIF, and addresses (bitcoin and alt coins). Following are some examples.

Create a BIP-32 key using the default entropy sources of GPG and /dev/random:

$ ku create input : create network : Bitcoin wallet key : xprv9s21ZrQH143K3LU5ctPZTBnb9kTjA5Su9DcWHvXJemiJBsY7VqXUG7hipgdWaU m2nhnzdvxJf5KJo9vjP2nABX65c5sFsWsV8oXcbpehtJi public version : xpub661MyMwAqRbcFpYYiuvZpKjKhnJDZYAkWSY76JvvD7FH4fsG3Nqiov2CfxzxY8 DGcpfT56AMFeo8M8KPkFMfLUtvwjwb6WPv8rY65L2q8Hz tree depth : 0 fingerprint : 9d9c6092 parent f'print : 00000000 child index : 0 chain code : 80574fb260edaa4905bc86c9a47d30c697c50047ed466c0d4a5167f6821e8f3c private key : yes secret exponent : 112471538590155650688604752840386134637231974546906847202389294096567806844862 hex : f8a8a28b28a916e1043cc0aca52033a18a13cab1638d544006469bc171fddfbe wif : L5Z54xi6qJusQT42JHA44mfPVZGjyb4XBRWfxAzUWwRiGx1kV4sP uncompressed : 5KhoEavGNNH4GHKoy2Ptu4KfdNp4r56L5B5un8FP6RZnbsz5Nmb public pair x : 76460638240546478364843397478278468101877117767873462127021560368290114016034 ...

Get Mastering Bitcoin, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.