SHA256 Hash doesn t match the one listed on Bitcoin Wiki

Question

I have been trying to create a bitcoin address but somehow, I am getting a different hash than the one shown in step 2.

Calculating the SHA256 hash on:

0250863ad64a87ae8a2fe83c1af1a8403cb53f53e486d8511dad8a04887e5b2352

Gives me the output:

a9ce83de3a0ff3516b7c50cdd787e9f69f152f227d93c9512774231e7132e925

The problem is according to the Bitcoin wiki I should get the following hash:

0b7c28c9b7290c98d7438e70b3d3f7c848fbd7d1dc194ff83f4f7cc9b1378e98

Can someone explain why I am not getting the same hash as the wikipedia?

Answer 1

The problem occurring here is that you are treating the 0250863ad64a87ae8a2fe83c1af1a8403cb53f53e486d8511dad8a04887e5b2352 value as an ASCII string, whereas you should be treating it as a hex representation of 32 bytes.

If you use it as a string, you will get the following result:

echo -n "0250863ad64a87ae8a2fe83c1af1a8403cb53f53e486d8511dad8a04887e5b2352" | openssl sha256 
(stdin)= a9ce83de3a0ff3516b7c50cdd787e9f69f152f227d93c9512774231e7132e925

If you treat it as bytes, then you will get the accurate and precise result:

echo -n "0250863ad64a87ae8a2fe83c1af1a8403cb53f53e486d8511dad8a04887e5b2352" | xxd -p -r | openssl sha256 
(stdin)= 0b7c28c9b7290c98d7438e70b3d3f7c848fbd7d1dc194ff83f4f7cc9b1378e98