page_title: Base58
section_title: Advantages
hierarchical_section_title: Base58 / Advantages
caption_attribution_description: English: A paper printable Bitcoin wallet with QR code consisting of one bitcoin address for receiving and the corresponding private key for spending. A bitcoin address is created from the public key and uses the base58 scheme. Base58 does not use the 0 (zero), I (upper case i), O (upper case o) and l (lower case L). In some fonts these 0OIl characters look the same. The private key can be imported in blockchain.info (mobile application) or another compatible cryptocurrency wallet. Created on bitaddress.org. Here on bitref.com you can see all the transactions made to and from the bitcoin address 1A5GqrNbpo7xwpt1VQVvcA5yzoEcgaFvff. With the private key KxSRZnttMtVhe17SX5FhPqWpKAEgMT9T3R6Eferj3sx5frM6obqA anyone can initiate a transaction. WARNING: Do not send bitcoins to this address, because anyone can and will take them automatically within seconds!
context_page_description: The base58 encoding scheme uses 58 characters. It is a binary-to-text encoding scheme that represent binary data in an ASCII string format.
  Satoshi Nakamoto invented the base58 encoding scheme when creating bitcoin.
context_section_description: The main difference between base58 and base62 is that base58 does not use the 0 (zero), I (capital i), O (capital o) and l (lower case L). In some fonts these 0OIl characters look the same. By not using those characters it eliminates human reading errors. The base64 also uses the + and / characters (and = for padding). Some messaging and social media systems line brake on non-alphanumeric strings. This is avoided by not using charaters like +, /, !, #, and so on. 
   123456789ABCDEFGH JKLMN PQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijk mnopqrstuvwxyz
  = 58 characters = base58
  
  0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
  = 62 characters = base62
  
  0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz+/
  = 64 characters = base64
caption: A bitcoin address does not use the 0OIl characters.
exif: {}