Overview of RIPEMD-160

The other underlying good hash function used in Bitcoin is RIPEMD-160. And again, although it's not required in order to gain an understanding of how Bitcoin works, it can be very helpful to see a working example implementation.

Note: This implementation is for informational purposes only. It has not been optimized or rigorously tested and should therefore not be used in a production environment. As a general rule, you should only ever use a rigorously tested and widely accepted implementation of any hash function.

Source Code can be found here: https://github.com/jakeBitcoinAssociation/hash-functions

Example Implementation of RIPEMD-160 in GoLang

Like SHA-256, RIPEMD-160 follows a Merkle Damgaard construction and can be split into three parts:

1. Input and Processing

   • Input

   • Message block construction

   • Message schedule construction

2. Compression

   • Initialization of working variables

   • Computation of temporary words and mutation of working variables

   • Integrate computed and mutated working variables with initial values

3. Final value construction and output