Address Conversion#

The hashes used in P2PKH and P2SH outputs are commonly encoded as Dash addresses. This is the procedure to encode those hashes and decode the addresses.

Conversion Process#

First, get your hash. For P2PKH, you RIPEMD-160(SHA256()) hash a ECDSA public key derived from your 256-bit ECDSA private key (random data). For P2SH, you RIPEMD-160(SHA256()) hash a redeem script serialized in the format used in raw transactions (described in a following sub-section). Taking the resulting hash:

  1. Add an address version byte in front of the hash. The version bytes commonly used by Dash are:

  2. Create a copy of the version and hash; then hash that twice with SHA256: SHA256(SHA256(version . hash))

  3. Extract the first four bytes from the double-hashed copy. These are used as a checksum to ensure the base hash gets transmitted correctly.

  4. Append the checksum to the version and hash, and encode it as a base58 string: BASE58(version . hash . checksum)

Example Code#

Dash’s base58 encoding, called Base58Check may not match other implementations. Tier Nolan provided the following example encoding algorithm to the Bitcoin Wiki Base58Check encoding page under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license:

code_string = "123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz"
x = convert_bytes_to_big_integer(hash_result)

output_string = ""

while(x > 0)
   {
       (x, remainder) = divide(x, 58)
       output_string.append(code_string[remainder])
   }

repeat(number_of_leading_zero_bytes_in_hash)
   {
   output_string.append(code_string[0]);
   }

output_string.reverse();

Dash’s own code can be traced using the base58 header file.

To convert addresses back into hashes, reverse the base58 encoding, extract the checksum, repeat the steps to create the checksum and compare it against the extracted checksum, and then remove the version byte.