With the aim of making Bitcoin products development easier and more effective, at Chainside we decided to develop btcpy, a new Python 3 SegWit-compliant library, which is focused on providing a simple interface to parse and create complex Bitcoin scripts. Differently from other existent Bitcoin libraries, btcpy is able to recognise and create arbitrary scripts in a simple fashion, something particularly important to develop Layer 2 applications, where complex smart contracts with timelocks, hashlocks and if-else clauses are needed.

During the scaling debate, some pointed out that it was preferable to keep Bitcoin simple rather than opting for technically more advanced, but complicated, solutions like SegWit and Layer 2 infrastructures. We do believe that for the long term success of Bitcoin the best technical solution is always preferable, but tools like btcpy to abstract its complexity are needed.

While others would have decided to keep such library private as a company asset, we choose to release it open source to the community, with the hope that it will help other developers to build amazing products and it will help the ecosystem to grow.

If you are a dev please try it and let us know what you think, feedback and PRs are highly appreciated.

btcpy can be found at https://github.com/chainside/btcpy