Hello monks,
First things first, if you do not know what bitcoin is: it is a decentralized monetary system created in 2009. Check out wikipedia to know more.
If you do know what bitcoin is but you do not like the idea for some political/economic/whatever reason, please just ignore this message and spare yourself some time by not trolling uselessly.
If you are still here, you may be interested in a bitcoin perl library I've been working on for some time now, though my work has been kind of halted in recent weeks.
So far, it is only on GitHub. There is also a perl6 version but it can not read the bitcoin database. I may put everything on CPAN one day, if it ever becomes a substantial project. But right now it's probably too messy and needs a lot of tidying up.
My ultimate goal with this was initially to rewrite the whole bitcoin code in Perl. Unfortunately, my lack of competence in network programming, in addition to a small excess of laziness, prevented me from reaching this goal.
Still, I do believe this library is kind of neat. You can use it to create new bitcoin addresses (so yeah, you can use it to receive actual bitcoins), sign or verify messages, scrutinize the block chain, and so on.
Here is a quick snapshot of the kind of stuff you can do:
use Bitcoin; my $key = new Bitcoin::Key; say $key->address; use Bitcoin::Block; say my $block = new Bitcoin::Block Bitcoin::Constants::GENESIS;
And other stuff, such as making raw transactions, but this has not been tested much yet.
Tell me what you think guys, and if you might be interested in contributing, let me know.