Base58

Base58 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes used to representlarge integers as alphanumeric text, introduced bySatoshi Nakamoto for use withBitcoin.It has since been applied to othercryptocurrencies and applications. It is similar toBase64 but has been modified to avoid both non-alphanumeric characters and letters which might look ambiguous when printed. It is therefore designed for human users who manually enter the data, copying from some visual source, but also allows easycopy and paste because adouble-click will usuallyselect the whole string.

Compared to Base64, the following similar-looking letters are omitted: 0 (zero), O (capital o), I (capital i) and l (lower case L) as well as the non-alphanumeric characters + (plus) and / (slash). In contrast to Base64, the digits of the encoding do not line up well withbyte boundaries of the original data. For this reason, the method is well-suited to encode large integers, but not designed to encode longer portions ofbinary data. The actual order of letters in the alphabet depends on the application, which is the reason why the term “Base58” alone is not enough to fully describe the format. A variant, Base56, excludes 1 (one) and o (lowercase o) compared to Base 58.

Base58Check is a Base58 encoding format that unambiguously encodes the type of data in the first few characters and includes anerror detection code in the last few characters.

Applications [ edit ]

Application Alphabet Bitcoin addresses 123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz IPFS hashes 123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz short URLs forFlickr 123456789abcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ

See also [ edit ]