Large values

[njmurarka]

I think the library is giving erroneous values for large numerical inputs. I was trying to use it to convert a BTC private key from hex to base58 and the result was incorrect.

[dougal]

The Base58 alphabet used by BTC is not the same as this one.

# BTC Base58 alphabet.
"123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz"

# Base58 alphabet of this gem.
"123456789abcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZ"

Someone previously asked for support for changing the alphabet, I would welcome a patch to achieve this.

Bitcoin docs: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Base58Check_encoding

[keirfb]

A second reason for not using this base58 library for producing bitcoin addresses is that it doesn't deal with leading zeroes in the manner that bitcoin requires. They get dropped when you convert your string of hex digits to an integer (and there are often many leading zeroes as the network bytes for the main bitcoin network are 00).

[dougal]

Bitcoin alphabet added via #6.

I'll create a separate issue for the leading 0s.