Quote from: alphabetacanary on January 04, 2018, 10:41:31 PM

Quote from: Pan Troglodytes on January 04, 2018, 09:09:43 PM

Of course it does leave 51 chars in base58 encoding. It is by no means surprising. As I said above, 152 flames, if you assume a flame codes only 2 bits i. e. two colors, inner and outer (with length bits EXCLUDED, exactly how you did exclude length information but using a different method), code 304 bits which is exactly the WIF length and as I said above, this is exactly the reason this theory was so appealing to many forum members (around page 29 of this thread I think)

Just to clarify terminology, WIF format is not 304 bits (my mistake on a previous post too, BTW).

WIF implies a base58 encoding because it's the format you import into a wallet. In this case, it would be either 306 bits for a non-compressed version and 312 for compressed version assuming 6 bits per char.

"assuming 6 bits per char". And it is a big assumption. In reality WIF IS 304 bits, consult with http://lenschulwitz.com/base58 and try to decode a sample WIF into the HEX and vice versa. If it were 306 bits it wouldn't decode to 38 byte (76 digit) HEX which is 304 bit only.

If we are on the level of terminology, the more accurate statement would be that WIF is a 51 char string with certain chars excluded.

This is all off-topic, just to be on the same page discussing terminology