Mastering Bitcoin, 2nd Edition

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 ...