Minimalistic python implementation of the Bitcoin networking stack. This library was developed to facilitate measurements in the Bitcoin network for some of my papers. It does include everything that is needed to connect and participate in the network, it does however not contain any crypto implementations other than the checksum mechanism. If you find this work useful please contribute back your modifications or give me a shout. Should you have a nice idea for a project, we're always looking for fun stuff to implement.

To install just checkout the git repository and use the included setup.py script to build and bundle it:

git clone [email protected]:cdecker/pycoin.git
python setup.py install

The following example creates a connection pool. It rewires the message handler on each connection to call the on_inv_received handler on the InvTracker instead, adding the connection as additional argument. When receiving an inv message it loops through the hashes and prints their type and hash to stdout.

from bitcoin import network

def on_inv_received(connection, inv):
    for item in inv.hashes:
        print connection.host, item[0], item[1].encode("hex")

def start():
    client = network.GeventNetworkClient()
    client.register_handler('inv', on_inv_received)
    network.ClientBehavior(client)
    client.connect(('seed.bitcoinstats.com', 8333))
    client.run_forever()
    
if __name__=="__main__":
    start()

v0.1 This release breaks some of the existing functionality and moves networking code into the bitcoin.network package. The twisted implementation is currenty broken since I concentrate mainly on gevent for my own clients.

v0.1.1 Added listening for incoming connection to GeventNetworkClient.

v0.2

• Removed legacy twisted API
• Increased test coverage (py.test)
• Code is now PEP8 compliant

v0.2.1 Minor bugfix release.

• Added six dependency for compatibility
• Fixed parsing of relay flag in version message
• Bumped gevent dependency to allow support for python 3 in some distant future

This code is distributed under the BSD 3-clause license.