About performing SHA-256 hashing on the public key

The result you are getting (3251...) is the result of sha256 on the string 0450....

The expected output on bitcoin.it is the result of sha256 on the bytes that are currently hex-encoded. To resolve this, hex-decode before hashing your input. In Python 2:

import hashlib
in_data = "0450863AD64A87AE8A2FE83C1AF1A8403CB53F53E486D8511DAD8A04887E5B23522CD470243453A299FA9E77237716103ABC11A1DF38855ED6F2EE187E9C582BA6".decode('hex')
my_sha = hashlib.sha256()
my_sha.update(in_data)
output = my_sha.digest().encode('hex')

That should retain output with the expected value.

JohnDvorak

Posted 2015-04-06T20:36:10.760

Reputation: 627

1Yep, that's tripped me up too. You'll need to use bytes objects - b"hexData" - for Python 3.x – Wizard Of Ozzie – 2015-04-08T15:43:47.053

1Good point. I'm not sure how to write the code so it's compatible with Python 3 ("string".encode('hex') is replaced), so unless you do I'll just specify Python 2 here. – JohnDvorak – 2015-04-08T15:49:32.760

1import codecs, then codecs.encode(codecs.decode("abcdef".encode("utf-8"), "hex")[::-1], "hex").decode()... It's quite counterintuitive IMO, as I'm so used to Python 2.7 – Wizard Of Ozzie – 2015-04-08T15:58:43.493

About performing SHA-256 hashing on the public key

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