Ethereum uses what base encoding?

Base 58 is about the dumbest thing ever

I've been learning Ethereum (because, you know, bitcoin). Being a networking kind of person, I'm looking at the networking protocols. Let's leave aside questionable choices like using Keccak-256 which can be argued are "forward looking" and not "completely unsupported by major languages".

No, lets look at encoding. Each Ethereum address is, of course, a big binary number. It's written out as hex (arguably silly, but whatever). It's then translated using, not base-64, but using base-58. As far as I can tell, this is something they just made up.

I'll ignore the lack of support in major languages.

Base-64 has the nice property that it's exactly 2^^6. This means that one byte transforms into one complete Base-64 value with 2 bits left over. Three bytes transforms neatly into four output bytes. A reader or writer can deal with small, finite-sized, easily handled values.

Base-58, on the other hand, is 5.858 bits. That's nothing useful. It means that any hand-crafted library is more likely to be wrong than to be right. The supposed benefit? So that a few characters that might be misinterpreted can be dropped.