How to base58 encode in ruby?

Question

I'm trying to encode a Protoshares wallet address in raw format as explained in the Bitcoin wiki to Base58 format.

Protoshares addresses start with P (version number 56).

I have given the raw address from the transaction. It looks like that:

028401a2e512b1b91b882ee1c9291cd407c10916bf791662f7189c9c805643e51c

Now I've followed the guide step-by-step from the wiki and my ruby code looks like that:

# 1 - Take the corresponding public key generated with it (65 bytes, 1 byte 0x04, 32 bytes corresponding to X coordinate, 32 bytes corresponding to Y coordinate)
  sender = '028401a2e512b1b91b882ee1c9291cd407c10916bf791662f7189c9c805643e51c'
# 2 - Perform SHA-256 hashing on the public key 
  sender = Digest::SHA256.new.update(sender)
# 3 - Perform RIPEMD-160 hashing on the result of SHA-256
  sender = Digest::RMD160.new.update(sender.to_s)
# 4 - Add version byte in front of RIPEMD-160 hash (0x00 for Main Network) 
  sender = '00' + sender.to_s
# 5 - Perform SHA-256 hash on the extended RIPEMD-160 result 
  checksum = Digest::SHA256.new.update(sender.to_s)
# 6 - Perform SHA-256 hash on the result of the previous SHA-256 hash 
  checksum = Digest::SHA256.new.update(checksum.to_s)
# 7 - Take the first 4 bytes of the second SHA-256 hash. This is the address checksum 
  checksum = checksum.to_s[0,8]
# 8 - Add the 4 checksum bytes from point 7 at the end of extended RIPEMD-160 hash from point 4. This is the 25-byte binary Bitcoin Address. 
  sender += checksum

This seems to work well so far. My current result looks like that:

0073eb40b21b02c08e93f6ef1bec5828763ac89e456c2f6fec

But now I'm stuck. I'm using the base58 gem by dougal and trying to finally encode the address:

# 9 - Convert the result from a byte string into a base58 string using Base58Check encoding. This is the most commonly used Bitcoin Address format 
  sender = Base58.encode(sender)

But I get the following issue:

/path/to/base58.rb:23:in `int_to_base58': Value passed is not an Integer. (ArgumentError)

Of course it's not an integer. Did I screwed up with data types here? What to do to get this working correctly?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Looks like a hexadecimal number stuck in a string to me, make it a number:

2.0.0p247 :001 > require 'base58'
 => true 
2.0.0p247 :002 > x = '0073eb40b21b02c08e93f6ef1bec5828763ac89e456c2f6fec'
 => "0073eb40b21b02c08e93f6ef1bec5828763ac89e456c2f6fec" 
2.0.0p247 :003 > Base58.encode(x.to_i(16))
 => "byVwGWzMZZ7HwsufSQx6T2pRapGZWdkAL" 

Not sure what your expected output is, but this executes...