base58btc

Base58btc is a base58 encoding that uses the Bitcoin alphabet, consisting of the digits 1 through 9 and the letters A–Z and a–z excluding the characters 0, O, I, and l. It is a variant of base58 designed to be compact and human-friendly by avoiding visually similar characters. In the multibase standard, the encoding is identified by the single-character prefix z, indicating base58btc.

In the multiformats and IPFS ecosystems, base58btc is commonly used to represent binary data in a text form. For example, many multihashes and content identifiers are encoded with base58btc and presented in textual form, often with the leading z when used in contexts that require a multibase prefix. The encoding itself does not provide a checksum; any integrity checking is performed by the underlying data format (for instance, a multihash includes its own structure), rather than by the base58btc encoding alone.

Leading zeros in the input data are encoded as the character 1 in base58btc, a property shared with other base58 encodings. The alphabet is case-sensitive and excludes the ambiguous characters noted above, which reduces transcription errors and misreads in manual handling or URL contexts.

Base58btc is related to the broader base58 family of encodings but is specifically named to reflect its usage with Bitcoin-style alphabets and its association with the multibase ecosystem. It serves as a practical textual representation for binary data within Bitcoin-adjacent and IPFS-style workflows.