• Tim (unregistered)

    wow I genuinely had never heard of base 85 before and thought it was some kind of joke

  • Maia Everett (github)

    19560 days is 53 and a half years, so it's counting since epoch (1970-01-01).

  • Robin (unregistered)

    w3schools have a sister site about Bitcoin? I guess that figures, the worst "learn web development" site on the net now trying to con those who've drunk the Crypto Kool Aid...

  • Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; -- (unregistered)

    The Base58/Base85 one isn't a WTF, unless it's the fact that they typo'd 85 as 58 in two places? They're not claiming it's encryption anywhere. It's a simple encoding with a higher information density than Base64, and that's exactly how it's presented.

  • Michael R (unregistered)

    Submitter of the BASE85 here. That is indeed a typo on that page. The real WTF is that I expect more of that website that works with pure mathematical stuff.

  • gnuser (unregistered) in reply to Maia Everett

    The uptime is user error, if the system doesn't have a real time clock, a shim like fake-hwclock should be used

  • Airdrik (unregistered) in reply to Michael R

    actually, it is base58 not base85. They explain it over here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Base58Check_encoding - it is base64 with some of the questionable characters removed for various reasons, making it more palatable in practice (but with a slightly lower density and with the added bonus that since the radix isn't a power of 2 it doesn't conveniently convert to/from bits so you have to load the whole numeric representation before you can do anything with it (in or out); vs. base64 which can be streamed in (multiples of) 6-bit chunks).

  • Jackz (unregistered) in reply to Robin

    It doesn't seem to be an official site of w3, I see no connection besides the theme

  • Michael R (unregistered) in reply to Airdrik

    I know it's BASE58. It only strikes me that four times on the page it is written correctly and thrice it is not.

  • (nodebb)

    Base58 (not to be confused with Base85, which is also a thing).

  • Neveranull (unregistered)

    When your laptop has been up for 19560 days, the additional 18 hours and 13 minutes is very important to keep track of, since it may require rebooting or overheat if left running too long.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Airdrik

    You can stream base58 as well, you just have to remember the last byte and can't simple bit shift but you have work with the remainder. So it's a slightly more annoying issue but nothing major.

  • Maarten (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous') OR 1=1; DROP TABLE wtf; --

    The biggest wtf with the btcschools page is that it isn't a compression, but a hash

  • Robin (unregistered) in reply to Jackz

    Maybe not, and it's probably impossible to say. But the similar name and almost identical styling can't help make me assume it's not a coincidence.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Maarten

    And with a name like "Base58", it shouldn't be either: It should simply be an encoding!

    Wait... if this is a hash, how is one supposed to "decode" it?

Leave a comment on “Total Zeroes”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article