1 /*Package base58 provides an API for working with modified base58 and Base58Check encodings.
2 3 Modified Base58 Encoding
4 5 Standard base58 encoding is similar to standard base64 encoding except, as the name implies, it uses a 58 character
6 alphabet which results in an alphanumeric string and allows some characters which are problematic for humans to be
7 excluded. Due to this, there can be various base58 alphabets.
8 9 The modified base58 alphabet used by Bitcoin, and hence this package, omits the 0, O, I, and l characters that look the
10 same in many fonts and are therefore hard to humans to distinguish.
11 12 Base58Check Encoding Scheme
13 14 The Base58Check encoding scheme is primarily used for Bitcoin addresses at the time of this writing, however it can be
15 used to generically encode arbitrary byte arrays into human-readable strings along with a version byte that can be used
16 to differentiate the same payload. For Bitcoin addresses, the extra version is used to differentiate the network of
17 otherwise identical public keys which helps prevent using an address intended for one network on another.
18 */
19 package base58
20