Bitcoin Improvement Proposals are design documents providing information to the Bitcoin community, or describing a new feature for Bitcoin or its processes or environment.
The Python library +pycoin+ (http://github.com/richardkiss/pycoin), originally written and maintained by Richard Kiss, is a Python-based library that supports manipulation of bitcoin keys and transactions, even supporting the scripting language enough to properly deal with non-standard transactions.
This appendix describes the main financial services offered in the bitcoin economy, comparing them to traditional financial services that are already familiar to consumers. It's not a list of sites or companies, as that would go stale immediately. Instead it is a list of service primitives with examples of existing implementations. For example, an escrow
service would be described as an archetype, by analogy to a real-estate escrow, showing the unique characteristics, use case and need for escrow in the bitcoin world. The escrow service archetype would be followed by two or three examples of well implemented actual escrow services, each demonstrating a capability unique to bitcoin.