Quote from: jadescorpio on March 22, 2014, 12:11:58 PM

Why do you need to convert bytes to base58 for addresses and wallet import format private keys? How can it be useful?

From the bitcoin wiki:

// Why base-58 instead of standard base-64 encoding?
// - Don't want 0OIl characters that look the same in some fonts and
// could be used to create visually identical looking account numbers.
// - A string with non-alphanumeric characters is not as easily accepted as an account number.
// - E-mail usually won't line-break if there's no punctuation to break at.
// - Doubleclicking selects the whole number as one word if it's all alphanumeric.