About the Base58 Encode
Base58 uses 58 characters, the alphanumerics minus the four that are easy to confuse in print: zero, capital O, capital I and lowercase l. It has no punctuation, so a Base58 string survives being double-clicked, emailed and read aloud, which is why Bitcoin addresses, IPFS content identifiers and many short-link schemes use it. This tool encodes the UTF-8 bytes of your text, preserving leading zero bytes as leading 1 characters, as the Bitcoin specification requires.
Base58 has no padding and no fixed block size, so the output length varies with the input. It is more compact than Base32 and slightly less compact than Base64. Like all these encodings it is reversible and offers no secrecy; the Base58 Decode tool reverses it.
How to use
- Paste the text.
- Copy the Base58 output.
- Use it where a compact, unambiguous string is needed.
Common questions
- Which characters are excluded?
- The digit 0, capital O, capital I and lowercase l, to avoid visual confusion.
- Is this the same as a Bitcoin address?
- It uses the same alphabet. A real address also includes a version byte and checksum (Base58Check), which this general encoder does not add.
- Why no padding?
- Base58 encodes the number represented by the bytes, so its length depends on the value, not on block boundaries.