It encodes octet arrays by doing long divisions on all significant digits in the
array, creating a representation of that number in the new base. Then for every
leading zero in the input (not significant as a number) it will encode as a
single leader character. This is the first in the alphabet and will decode as 8
bits. The other characters depend upon the base. For example, a base58 alphabet
packs roughly 5.858 bits per character.
This means the encoded string 000f (using a base16, 0-f alphabet) will actually decode
to 4 bytes unlike a canonical hex encoding which uniformly packs 4 bits into each
character.
While unusual, this does mean that no padding is required and it works for bases
like 43.
## LICENSE [MIT](LICENSE)
A direct derivation of the base58 implementation from [`bitcoin/bitcoin`](https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/f1e2f2a85962c1664e4e55471061af0eaa798d40/src/base58.cpp), generalized for variable length alphabets.