Base58

Base58 is a encoding scheme invented by Satoshi Nakomoto for Bitcoin. It forgoes "look-a-like" characters, i.e. 0 and O, l and I to prevent mistranscription or deliberately similar adddresses.

To convert a base10 number to base 58 use modulo 58 successively and write the remainders right to left. Then lookup the relevant characters in a base58 table and convert.

Base58 table (from the Bitcoin wiki)

Value	Character	Value	Character	Value	Character	Value	Character
0	1	1	2	2	3	3	4
4	5	5	6	6	7	7	8
8	9	9	A	10	B	11	C
12	D	13	E	14	F	15	G
16	H	17	J	18	K	19	L
20	M	21	N	22	P	23	Q
24	R	25	S	26	T	27	U
28	V	29	W	30	X	31	Y
32	Z	33	a	34	b	35	c
36	d	37	e	38	f	39	g
40	h	41	i	42	j	43	k
44	m	45	n	46	o	47	p
48	q	49	r	50	s	51	t
52	u	53	v	54	w	55	x
56	y	57	z

Notable Uses

• Bitcoin Addresses
• Other cryptocurrency addresses
• IPFS multihashes
• Flickr short URLS