Re: Use of Base58 in technical specifications

Base58 is heavily used in various circles where I live (various things
Hyperledger/Sovrin; mainstream cryptocurrency wallets I use; peer DIDs;
etc). It is always with the Bitcoin alphabet, never Flickr's or one of the
more exotic variants. I, too, have never seen line-breaks in it.

On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 1:43 PM Christopher Allen <
ChristopherA@lifewithalacrity.com> wrote:

> I'm trying to get an understanding of the use of base58 and base58check in
> technical specifications (not standards), in particular, how broad the
> usage is of bae58 in the non-IETF/W3C standards based blockchain
> communities.
>
> Base58 similar to Base64 but has been modified to avoid both
> non-alphanumeric characters and letters which might look ambiguous when
> printed. Base58 achieves 73% efficiency. Like Base64URL, it avoids conflict
> with URI reserved characters, but it doesn't seem to say anything about
> forbidding line-break characters (but I've never seen linebreaks in a
> base58).
>
> It has been argued: "We reject Base58 and Base58Check (for use in a URI)
> due to their lack of widespread adoption."
>
> But just because the IETF and W3C standards communities this is true,
> isn't necessarily a sufficient argument that it lacks "widespread
> adoption".
>
> — Christopher Allen
>