Mastering Bitcoin, 2nd Edition

Appendix F. Bitcoin Explorer (bx) Commands

Bitcoin Explorer (bx) is a command-line tool that offers a variety of commands for key management and transaction construction. It is part of the libbitcoin bitcoin library.

Usage: bx COMMAND [--help]

Info: The bx commands are:

address-decode
address-embed
address-encode
address-validate
base16-decode
base16-encode
base58-decode
base58-encode
base58check-decode
base58check-encode
base64-decode
base64-encode
bitcoin160
bitcoin256
btc-to-satoshi
ec-add
ec-add-secrets
ec-multiply
ec-multiply-secrets
ec-new
ec-to-address
ec-to-public
ec-to-wif
fetch-balance
fetch-header
fetch-height
fetch-history
fetch-stealth
fetch-tx
fetch-tx-index
hd-new
hd-private
hd-public
hd-to-address
hd-to-ec
hd-to-public
hd-to-wif
help
input-set
input-sign
input-validate
message-sign
message-validate
mnemonic-decode
mnemonic-encode
ripemd160
satoshi-to-btc
script-decode
script-encode
script-to-address
seed
send-tx
send-tx-node
send-tx-p2p
settings
sha160
sha256
sha512
stealth-decode
stealth-encode
stealth-public
stealth-secret
stealth-shared
tx-decode
tx-encode
uri-decode
uri-encode
validate-tx
watch-address
wif-to-ec
wif-to-public
wrap-decode
wrap-encode

For more information, see the Bitcoin Explorer homepage and Bitcoin Explorer user documentation.

Examples of bx Command Use

Let’s look at some examples of using Bitcoin Explorer commands to experiment with keys and addresses.

Generate a random “seed” value using the seed command, which uses the operating system’s ...