Would you be open to moving this to rust-bitcoin org and letting us implement the rust-bitcoin API?

[apoelstra]

Really what I'm asking is - is this crate maintained, and if not, could we have the base58 name on crates.io?

Failing that, could we combine the base58 code in rust-bitcoin with this crate, allow rust-bitcoin people to make a new release, and unify the APIs? I know a goal of this crate is to be small, which I think we can retain, and to be fast, which we will definitely maintain (will not replace any algos unless we have a clear speedup) (although we will add base58ck support which requires sha2 which is inherently way slower than anything else related to the format).

[tcharding]

FTR the base58 crate just does encoding/decoding while the base58check crate handles the checksum and depends on base58 and sha2. I don't think we can do a simple name takeover even if @debris agreed to give it away since we want to provide a single "base58 and checksum" crate that depends on bitcoin_hashes.

[debris]

@apoelstra I can add you as an Owner of this crate on crates.io if you would like to take over the maintenance of it and release future versions. Is that ok for you?

[apoelstra]

@debris that would be great but we would want to replace the crate with our own, and just take the same. You can see our crate here https://github.com/rust-bitcoin/rust-bitcoin/tree/master/base58

We would bump the version to 0.100.0 or something to try to signal that there was a hard break, but it may still be surprising to downstream users.

So I would only accept ownership if you would be okay with that.