{{omit from|Brlcad}} {{omit from|GUISS}} ;Task: Write a program that takes a [[wp:bitcoin|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: :::*   0   zero :::*   O   uppercase oh :::*   I   uppercase eye :::*   l   lowercase ell With this encoding, a bitcoin address encodes 25 bytes: * the first byte is the version number, which will be zero for this task ; * the next twenty bytes are a [[RIPEMD-160]] digest, but you don't have to know that for this task: you can consider them a pure arbitrary data ; * the last four bytes are a checksum check. They are the first four bytes of a double [[SHA-256]] digest of the previous 21 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]]. ;Example of a bitcoin address: 1AGNa15ZQXAZUgFiqJ2i7Z2DPU2J6hW62i 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.