Author: Matt Whitlock 2014-04-08 11:52:41
Published on: 2014-04-08T11:52:41+00:00
In an email conversation on April 7, 2014, Gregory Maxwell, a Bitcoin Core developer, wrote that there is no need to use big integers for encoding Base58Check. He provided a link to a C program that could decode Base58Check without using big integer arithmetic. However, Matt Whitlock pointed out that the program only decoded Base58Check and did not have an encode function, which would require big integer division. In response, Maxwell argued that the same process of long division with manual carries works just fine for encoding, without needing to use big integers. This led to a debate over whether or not big-integer division was necessary, with one participant questioning if encoding and decoding Base58 was easier than Shamir's Secret Sharing because the divisors are small.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T17:00:08.560185+00:00