3 ms·
The problem with words is that their encoding density is much lower, so it requires more space to store. Suppose you create an alphabet A that consists of the N
by 10000truths 2y ago
The problem with words is that their encoding density is much lower, so it requires more space to store. Suppose you create an alphabet A that consists of the N most common English words. Then, what might be Q characters in base 58 would instead require Q*ln(58)/ln(N)*((avg word length in A)+1)-1 characters. For N=1000 and assuming that the average word length is 5, this gives a factor of ~3.5x increase in storage space required (e.g. a 20 character base-58 ID would map to a ~70 character string of words).
- tornadofart 2y agoThat is true. But is it really a storage problem? Could you not store in whatever base-N arithmetic that has high encoding density, and "just" use the words for display/printing and such? Probably it is more a problem of restricting the range of representable numbers because users are unable to handle pages over pages of random words...
- Dylan16807 2y agoWho cares about that much space? If you do, you're not storing your bits as text to begin with.