Hashes & Merkle Trees in Blockchain Mechanics

Hash Functions take input of any length and produce a fixed-length string which means that one can use hashes on something as small as a few characters or as large as an entire document or even files of huge sizes in GBs and above. 

On the other hand enabled by these hash functions, Merkle tree represent hash-based data structure that is a generalization of the hash list and represent structure in which each leaf node is a hash of a block of data, and each non-leaf node is a hash of its children. Both Hash functions and Merkle Trees are cardinal to the mechanics of any Blockchain. 

This video focuses on a simple explanation of understanding Hashes and Merkle Trees. Hash functions SHA-256 and RIPEMD-160 have been discussed in little detail being peculiar to Bitcoin blockchain.

Bitcoin Address Generation : The Internals Behind

ECDSA stands for Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm and uses an elliptic curve and a finite field to "sign" data in such a way that third parties can verify the authenticity of the signature while the signer retains the exclusive ability to create the signature. The Bitcoin addressing system is not a simple deal.In order to maintain that a public key cannot be deciphered easily to any identity and in future if ECDSA is compromised at all, still,the anonymity remains.So suppose you have a ECDSA based private key,the following post content will give a step by step sequence of how the final bitcoin address is derived :

Sequence flow chart is shown below :

Image courtesy : https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/mastering-bitcoin-2nd/9781491954379/assets/mbc2_0405.png

Your sample private key :

18E14A7B6A307F426A94F8114701E7C8E774E7F9A47E2C2035DB29A206321725

Public key derived is 

0450863AD64A87AE8A2FE83C1AF1A8403CB53F53E486D8511DAD8A04887E5B2

3522CD470243453A299FA9E77237716103ABC11A1DF38855ED6F2EE187E9C582

BA6

Site reference : https://www.bitaddress.org

Screen shot below : 

 Now perform SHA-256 hashing on the hex of the public key as shown below in the screenshot :

The SHA-256 output received is 

600ffe422b4e00731a59557a5cca46cc183944191006324a447bdb2d98d4b408

Now we take RIPEMD-160 Hash of the above output and get this as follows as seen vide the screenshot :

010966776006953d5567439e5e39f86a0d273bee

Now add Add version byte in front of RIPEMD-160 hash (0x00 for Main Network).so that the above output becomes :

00010966776006953D5567439E5E39F86A0D273BEE

Further to above,Perform SHA-256 hash on the extended RIPEMD-160 result ie

 

 so we get
445c7a8007a93d8733188288bb320a8fe2debd2ae1b47f0f50bc10bae845c094

and now we perform SHA-256 hash on the result of the this recent SHA-256 hash as seen below in the screenshot...and we get this as 

d61967f63c7dd183914a4ae452c9f6ad5d462ce3d277798075b107615c1a8a30

Now take the first 4 bytes of the second SHA-256 hash and this is the address checksum ie D61967F6

and then add the 4 checksum bytes at the end of extended RIPEMD-160 hash as hashed above and we get the 25-byte binary Bitcoin Address.

00010966776006953D5567439E5E39F86A0D273BEED61967F6

Now the last step...we  Convert the result from a byte string into a base58 string using Base58Check encoding at https://incoherency.co.uk/base58/

 Bitcoin Address : 

16UwLL9Risc3QfPqBUvKofHmBQ7wMtjvM

Useful links : 

http://gobittest.appspot.com/Address

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_version_1_Bitcoin_addresses

https://anyhash.com/

https://incoherency.co.uk/base58/

https://www.bitaddress.org/