In this section, we are going to introduce the following topics:

• The Raspberry Pi Bitcoin tools library and how to start using it
• How to generate private keys and public keys
• How to create a simple bitcoin address from the private keys and public keys you generated

To install the Pi Bitcoin tools library, open the command-line program and execute the following command:

pip install bitcoin

This library...

A multisignature address is an address that is associated with more than one private key; therefore, we need to create three private keys.

Go through the following steps to create a multisignature bitcoin address:

1. Create three private keys:

#!/usr/bin/env python
'''
Title - Create multi-signature address

This program demonstrates the creation of
Multi-signature bitcoin address.
'''
# import bitcoin
from bitcoin import *

# Create Private Keys
my_private_key1 = random_key()
my_private_key2 = random_key()
my_private_key3 = random_key()

print("Private Key1: %s" % my_private_key1)
print("Private Key2: %s" % my_private_key2)
print("Private Key3: %s" % my_private_key3)
print('\n')

2. Create three public keys from those private keys using the privtopub function:

# Create Public keys
my_public_key1...

Blockchain.info is one of the most popular blockchain and bitcoin network explorers and wallet providers. From the web, you can view the block level and see all the transactions that have happened. For example, by going to this particular block—that is, Block #536081—you can see all the transactions, as well as some other information, as shown in the following screenshot:

The following screenshot shows the statistical data (DATA | Stats). This is great, and useful as well; however, for a developer building applications or performing analysis based on this data, it is important to get this data programmatically:

The following screenshot shows the market data (DATA | Markets):

The following are the steps to install the blockchain Python library:

1. Open the command-line program on your computer.
2. Run the pip install blockchain command to install the blockchain library.

The following screenshot shows the installation of bitcoin:

The following steps shows the method for bitcoin exchange rates:

1. First, import the exchangerates classes from the blockchain library:

#!/usr/bin/env python

# import blockchain library
from blockchain import exchangerates

2. Exchange rates define a get_ticker method, which returns the exchange rates data in a dictionary object. Call this method and save the resulting object. The...

Some features of bitcoin mining are as follows:

• Bitcoin mining is the process of adding bitcoin transactional data to bitcoin's global public ledger of past transactions. Each bitcoin miner gets involved with all the other miners in order to gather the outstanding transactions into a block by dealing with specialized analytical and arithmetical problems.
• In order to gain accuracy and solve the problems, bitcoin miners gain all of the transactions they process.
• In addition to transaction fees, miners also receive an additional reward for each block they mine. Anyone can participate in bitcoin mining by running a computer program. In addition to running on traditional computers, some companies have designed specialized bitcoin mining hardware that can process transactions and build blocks much more quickly.

One can choose to mine bitcoin in the cloud...

There is also plenty of bitcoin mining software available, which can run on any machine. However, it may not be as efficient anymore. For example, let's go to http://www.bitcoinx.com/bitcoin-mining-software/ for a long list of such software. They can run on all kinds of operating systems: Windows, Linux, and macOS. There are UI-based bitcoin miners, as well as command-line-based bitcoin miners—for example, Pyminer, which is an implementation in Python.

Because of the increasing competition and difficulties, there are many factors that must be borne in mind when mining bitcoin, as shown in the following list:

• Bitcoins are getting more expensive day by day because of competition
• Many supercomputers across the globe are in competition to mine the next block and bitcoin
• As the number of bitcoin miners has increased, it has become more problematic and overpriced to start mining new bitcoin

For example, the following screenshot shows a chart of how the difficulty of bitcoin mining has been increasing; for more information refer to https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty. This particular chart shows values from the last two months. This recent trend reflects the increasing difficulty that began when bitcoin was first created:

In this chapter, we learned how to get started programming bitcoin with Python. We explored Blockchain.info API programming with Python to get statistics and other bitcoin market data.

We also learned how to get started with mining bitcoin. We looked at the various ways to mine bitcoin, and we learned about why bitcoin mining may not be for everybody because of its increasing competition and difficulty.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to start running bitcoin programmatically by way of accepting bitcoin on your website, running API-based microservices, or by building a bitcoin trading bot.