Encoding Base58: Understanding and implementing in Scala
I recently needed to convert to and from Base58. An existing crypto library was not an option, because I just needed one function exact function. However, I could not find a suitable Scala implementation, and the algorithm in the specification was unclear.
Understanding the algorithm
An encoding algorithm is just a base transformation, it is the same as transforming between base 2 (binary), 16 (hexadecimal), 10 (decimal) or any other base. The trick here is that the target base has a mapping we can nicely represent to ASCII symbols and as a string of characters. For Base58, the alphabet is:
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