Base58 presumably included the "not mangleable by intermediate servers
   that only speak ascii" design constraint.

   Adam Back <adam@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!).  Then you have URL encoding
ambiguity, 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.
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
     - base 4096 (for UTF8 channels)

     i like base85. ;)
     diversity!

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