[aliqot]

That's a great example that reminds me of another one: there was nothing new about Bitcoin conceptually, it was all concepts we already had just in a new combination. IRC, Hashing, Proof of Work, Distributed Consensus, Difficulty algorithms, you name it. Aside from Base58 there wasn't much original other than the combination of those elements.

[stavros]

Base58 really should have been base57.

[aliqot]

Hello Stavros, I agree. When I look at the goals that base58 sought to achieve, (eliminating visually similar characters) I couldn't help but wonder why more characters were not eliminated. There is quite a bit of typeface androgyny when you consider case and face.

[stavros]

Yeah, I don't know why 1 was left in there, seems like a lost opportunity. Discarding l, I, 0, O, but then leaving 1? I wonder why.

[aliqot]

I can only assume it was for a superstitious reason so that the original address prefixes could be a 1. This is the only sense I can make from it.