How to resolve the algorithm Bitcoin/address validation step by step in the Tcl programming language

Published on 12 May 2024 09:40 PM

How to resolve the algorithm Bitcoin/address validation step by step in the Tcl programming language

Table of Contents

Problem Statement

Write a program that takes a bitcoin address as argument, and checks whether or not this address is valid. A bitcoin address uses a base58 encoding, which uses an alphabet of the characters 0 .. 9, A ..Z, a .. z, but without the four characters:

With this encoding, a bitcoin address encodes 25 bytes:

To check the bitcoin address, you must read the first twenty-one bytes, compute the checksum, and check that it corresponds to the last four bytes. The program can either return a boolean value or throw an exception when not valid. You can use a digest library for SHA-256.

It doesn't belong to anyone and is part of the test suite of the bitcoin software.
You can change a few characters in this string and check that it'll fail the test.

Let's start with the solution:

Step by Step solution about How to resolve the algorithm Bitcoin/address validation step by step in the Tcl programming language

Source code in the tcl programming language

package require sha256

# Generate a large and boring piece of code to do the decoding of
# base58-encoded data.
apply {{} {
    set chars "123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz"
    set i -1
    foreach c [split $chars ""] {
	lappend map $c "return -level 0 [incr i]"
    }
    lappend map default {return -code error "bad character \"$c\""}
    proc base58decode str [string map [list @BODY@ [list $map]] {
	set num 0
	set count [expr {ceil(log(58**[string length $str])/log(256))}]
	foreach c [split $str {}] {
	    set num [expr {$num*58+[switch $c @BODY@]}]
	}
	for {set i 0} {$i < $count} {incr i} {
	    append result [binary format c [expr {$num & 255}]]
	    set num [expr {$num >> 8}]
	}
	return [string reverse $result]
    }]
}}

# How to check bitcoin address validity
proc bitcoin_addressValid {address} {
    set a [base58decode $address]
    set ck [sha2::sha256 -bin [sha2::sha256 -bin [string range $a 0 end-4]]]
    if {[string range $a end-3 end] ne [string range $ck 0 3]} {
	return -code error "signature does not match"
    }
    return "$address is ok"
}


puts [bitcoin_addressValid 1Q1pE5vPGEEMqRcVRMbtBK842Y6Pzo6nK9]
puts [bitcoin_addressValid 1AGNa15ZQXAZUgFiqJ2i7Z2DPU2J6hW62i]


  

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