Quote from: HairyMaclairy on August 28, 2018, 01:32:58 PM

Craig claims Base58 was used by FlickR in 2007 in this tweet after being asked if he invented it.

https://twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/1034107267568885763

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Didnt you invent base58check? You should explain why..

.

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No, Base58 was used by FlickR in 2007

He states that again here.

https://twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/1034124182181830656

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It explains the format Flikr introduced in 2007 on their servers...

However this blog post from 2009 contradicts that by saying flickr recently introduced its short URL service which makes use of base58.

http://mattsblog.ca/2009/08/08/flickr-short-url-generator/

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August 8th, 2009 at 5:14 PM (9 years ago) by Matt Freedman

Recently, Flickr introduced its short URL service for all photos (and videos) hosted on Flickr. All photos and videos have a corresponding flic.kr URL associated with them, in the format of flic.kr/p/xxxxxx (the last part is the base-58 encoding of the photo-id)

If flickr was using base58 on its servers in 2007 it should show up in short links in the source code of pages archived back then, but it doesn't.

The image on this page was archived in 2007, then again in 2009.

http://www.flickr.com:80/photos/pmorgan/32606683/

A shortened link to it containing base58 doesn't show in the December 2007 snapshot of it, but does in the 2009 snapshot. Search the source code of these two snapshots for flic.kr/p/ yourself. It only appears in the 2009 snapshot.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071011015832/http://www.flickr.com:80/photos/pmorgan/32606683/

https://web.archive.org/web/20090929075056/http://www.flickr.com:80/photos/pmorgan/32606683/

I wonder if flickr would confirm it copied base58 from bitcoin and didn't invent the format itself.

the artful bodger

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