I think it's just that the 0s at the start are compressed into nothing like you do with numbers.
It's more logical to write 5462 than 00005462 unless you're using a screen or memory system that specifically implies its usage.
It's probably possible to get a 1 character base 58 ripemd hash too which is potentially still secure (I haven't looked into anything other than sha1 and 2)....
It's more logical to write 5462 than 00005462 unless you're using a screen or memory system that specifically implies its usage.
It's probably possible to get a 1 character base 58 ripemd hash too which is potentially still secure (I haven't looked into anything other than sha1 and 2)....
hashes are not numbers, they are bytes. so there is a big difference between 5462 and 00005462 if it is hash. even if your hash result was all zeros it still is 160 bits or 20 bytes of zero and when passed to an encoder the entire 20 bytes is passed and when base58 encoding sees zeros at the start it replaces them with 1s. other encodings do similar things, for example base16 replaces it with 00, bech32 replaces it with q and so on.
