Are you a developer trying to figure out how a bitcoin "wallet" is actually generated without getting into all the ins and outs? This guide might help you.

The guide is based on this excellent webpage: http://www.mobilefish.com/services/cryptocurrency/cryptocurrency.html So most of the comments where extrated from that page.

The procedural code demo will introduce you to all the concepts involved in the creation of a bitcoin wallet. If you follow the code step by step in main.py and utils.py, some of your basic questions regarding Private Keys, Public Keys, WIF's, uncompressed/compressed WIF's, etc. will be answered by looking at an actual implemenation.

This guide will assume that you know the basics of the following topics:

• Numeral systems: base-2 (binary), base-10 (decimal), base-16 (hexadecimal), base-58
• Asymmetric cryptography A.K.A Public Key Cryptography
• Hashing

In order to follow along, you'll need Python 2.7 and some crypto/bitcoin libraries:

$ pip install hashlib
$ pip install pybitcointools 
$ pip install pybitcoin

Once those libraries are installed, you can just simply run the main.py (Python 2.7):

$ python main.py

• http://www.mobilefish.com/services/cryptocurrency/cryptocurrency.html
• https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet_import_format
• https://github.com/vbuterin/pybitcointools
• https://github.com/blockstack/pybitcoin
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2u0tin/why_are_private_keys_called_compressed_if_theyre/
• https://www.anintegratedworld.com/how-to-manually-calculate-base58check-encoding/

The provided code is only intended to show you the basics of a bitcoin wallet creation. Use the code at your own risk.

MIT