Hacker News Reader

Comment by silvestrov | Hacker News Reader

Problem with using base58 is that it uses 24 letters (excl 'I') so you can end up with 4 letter words that the marketing/PR departments does not like.

Hexadecimal is safe.

View on HN

I like Crockford 32. It has more letters than hex, but is resistant to swear words.

https://www.crockford.com/base32.html

> resistant to swear words

No it's not.

Edit: downvoters, a tame example is 0x72b5473d5a567200.

I have no idea what that is supposed to say.

You take that hex and turn it into Crockford32 and it says eatmefatass00.

Resistant might be a strong word. I can see it only has E, A and Y as vowels which maybe helps a little for English as long as you're not the SATAN himself.

It's also trivially easy to reroll ids until they don't contain a swear.

Collecting the dictionary of all swear words for all languages and their dialects might be less trivial. Keeping it up to date would probably take an institute worth of researchers.

And there's no "forward secrecy" - if a normal word becomes a swear, then it's often hard to go through and change all uuids.

Which is why the standard has been base16 (or base10) for so long.

But what if deadbeef becomes a swear?

/s… but only halfway

Modi is out of control.

They did naz1 that coming.

What's more, unlike b58, it's case insensitive.

I usually favour b32 for IDs. There's also word encodings, but frankly those have more lewd combinations than they don't to a mind such as mine.

More importantly, Base58 is orders of magnitude slower than Base64/Base32/Base16 due to O(N^2) algorithms required to encode/decode it. Blockchain software is already trying to get rid of it. Adopting Base58 now would be shortsighted.

Well, mostly. Still have to be careful of l33tsp34k, where you can end up with things like b00b.

> where you can end up with things like b00b

Honestly, if seeing the character string "b00b" is a problem, you have bigger problems.

Maybe you have users which will spam one of your services until they get something that has b00b in it.

> Hexadecimal is safe.

Oh yeah?

ABADBABE B16B00B5 0B00B135 BEEFBABE CAFEBABE DEADBEEF

And a few others that I'm probably forgetting...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com