Join the technological revolution that's taking the financial world by storm. Mastering Bitcoin is your guide through the seemingly complex world of Bitcoin, providing the knowledge you need to participate in the internet of money. Whether you're building the next killer app, investing in a startup, or simply curious about the technology, this revised and expanded third edition provides essential detail to get you started. All the code snippets can be replicated on most operating systems with a minimal installation of compilers and interpreters for the corresponding languages. Where necessary, we provide basic installation instructions and step-by-step examples of the output of those instructions. However, there are libraries in most popular programming languages that “wrap” the Bitcoin Core API in a way that makes this a lot simpler. We will use the python-bitcoinlib library to simplify API access. This library is not part of the Bitcoin Core project and needs to be installed the usual way you install Python libraries. Remember, this requires you to have a running Bitcoin Core instance, which will be used to make JSON-RPC calls. The Python script makes a simple getblockchaininfo call and prints the block parameter from the data returned by Bitcoin Core.