It’s time to get our hands dirty. Let’s begin bootstrapping our Haskell development environment. Before we proceed it’s probably fair to note that it’s very early days for Bitcoin development using Haskell and like users of most languages one should expect the Bitcoin libraries to be changing rapidly.

In this blog post I’m going to concentrate on Bitcoin wallets which will be our foundation for a more developer-oriented discussion. Wallets are analogous to web browsers in that they are the main interface for end users to interact with the network. In its simplest form it is a file which contains a collection of private keys. In addition the wallet software usually takes care of communicating with peers, managing the blockchain and keeping records of wallet transactions.

Bitcoin is an exciting new technology invented by the mysterious Satoshi in 2009 which has been gaining some serious traction in the last few months. Although there are many introductory blog posts about Bitcoin there aren’t necessarily many which tackle the subject from a developer’s perspective.