base58 vs alt-alpha base64? (Re: Re: Curve p25519 Replacements for GnuPG?(x2 now) Re: Pretty Curved Privacy.. ECC Curve p25519 util(Bernstein approved curve))

[nymble]

On Jan 11, 2014, at 5:47 AM, Adam Back <adam at cypherspace.org> wrote:

> Bitcoin base58 seemed a to have some minor unfortunate side effects to me,
> the intent is good to avoid transcription error, but surely one could find
> 64-chars.  it could have easily been base 60 to start with (dont delete both
> 0 and O, and 1 and l just make the equivalent!).  
Possible, but breaks string compare.  Also adds human confusion in interpretation/typing.


> Then you have URL encoding
> ambiguity,
oh … yes.  same point

> C/python/bash programming string quoting that rules out some more
> non alphanum chars.  (base 64 includes +/).  Just seems some ugly code mess
> and implications for vanity address etc to deal with non-power-of-2
> encoding.
Yes … code is very ugly,  Human usability is more important ...

> 
> Adam
> 
> On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 10:58:48AM +0100, stef wrote:
>>> > 1l0$WoM5C8z=yeZG7?$]f^Uu8.g>4rf#t^6mfW9(rr910
>>> one of several possible text encodings
>>> Others might include:
>>> - base 29
>>> - base 59
oops intended base 58
>>> - base 4096 (for UTF8 channels)
base64: "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789+/“
   compact, nice power of 2, human transcription errors likely
base58: “123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz”
    fairly readable, relatively compact
base29:  “ABCDEFGHJKMNPQRTUVWXYZ2346789"
   base 29 assumes lower upper case equivalence, always converts to upper for decode
    (removes  5,S  0,O  i,1,i,I )
   base 29 has the best human usability/readability and is not mangled
   very good for license keys and short sequences
   … 1/2 of efficiency (losing lower versus upper)

>> i like base85. ;)
oh - thanks, assume you mean RFC1924
base85: “0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz!#$%&()*+-;<=>?@^_`{|}~”
    nice shorter encoding.  Not  URL or human friendly, works well for email cut/paste  ‘<‘ might be problematic for web usage.


Paul

>> 
>> diversity!