Base58 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes used to represent large integers as alphanumeric text.
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Copyright 2011 Google Inc.
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Copyright 2018 Andreas Schildbach
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Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
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you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
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You may obtain a copy of the License at
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Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
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distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
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WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
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See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
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limitations under the License.
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Base58 is a way to encode Bitcoin addresses (or arbitrary data) as alphanumeric strings.
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Note that this is not the same base58 as used by Flickr, which you may find referenced around the Internet.
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You may want to consider working with {@link PrefixedChecksummedBytes} instead, which
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adds support for testing the prefix and suffix bytes commonly found in addresses.
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Satoshi explains: why base-58 instead of standard base-64 encoding?
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- Don't want 0OIl characters that look the same in some fonts and
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could be used to create visually identical looking account numbers.</li> - A string with non-alphanumeric characters is not as easily accepted as an account number.
- E-mail usually won't line-break if there's no punctuation to break at.
- Doubleclicking selects the whole number as one word if it's all alphanumeric.
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However, note that the encoding/decoding runs in O(n²) time, so it is not useful for large data.
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The basic idea of the encoding is to treat the data bytes as a large number represented using
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base-256 digits, convert the number to be represented using base-58 digits, preserve the exact
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number of leading zeros (which are otherwise lost during the mathematical operations on the
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numbers), and finally represent the resulting base-58 digits as alphanumeric ASCII characters.