btcutil VS typeid

Your IDs are []byte of len=11. Those bytes can be represented in many ways.

You can represent them as hex strings via encoding/hex.EncodeToString(id), or base64 strings via encoding/base64.StdEncoding.EncodeToString(id), or base32 strings via encoding/base32.StdEncoding.EncodeToString(id), or etc.

Looks like the most used base58 package is https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/btcsuite/btcutil/base58, but looking at the implementation [0] I'm not impressed, and confident there's a better implementation

[0] https://github.com/btcsuite/btcutil/blob/v1.0.2/base58/base5...

But how you encode 11 bytes of data is kind of orthogonal to the important thing, which is that you have 11 bytes of data. They should be always be store in memory (in your application, or a DB, or anything else) as the actual 11 bytes of the ID, and not as a base58 or base64 or JSON or whatever other kind of string that can be decoded to the actual 11 bytes of data.

Likewise, a UUID shouldn't be stored as a string like "64d3f2e0-a4dc-48d3-98ad-7f09eb3b082f", that's a specific encoding of the actual 16 UUID bytes, you should store, process, etc. those bytes directly.

Golang: https://github.com/btcsuite/btcutil

I’ve seen this sort of design referred to as “typed IDs”: https://github.com/jetify-com/typeid

Doesn’t use the crockford encoding, but does is another one that minimises confusables.

https://github.com/uuid6/new-uuid-encoding-techniques-ietf-d...

But there is always TypeID in the meantime which uses UUIDv7 under the hood: https://github.com/jetify-com/typeid

Either way, I am in favor of prefixing and using alternative encodings, but it will need some time to figure out the best route. In the mean time, there are so many alternatives. TypeID, NanoID, ULID, etc. I even made my own quick one just for giggles: https://github.com/daegalus/snowflakes

If you want a type-prefixed UUIDv7 type, I can wholeheartedly recommend TypeID-JS: https://github.com/jetpack-io/typeid-js

Also available for a whole bunch of other languages: https://github.com/jetpack-io/typeid

UUIDv7 is UUIDv4-compatible (i.e. you can put a v7 UUID anywhere a v4 UUID would go, like in Postgres's UUID datatype) and is time-series sortable, so you don't lose that nice lil' benefit of auto-incrementing IDs.

And if you use something like TypeORM to define your entities, you can use a Transformer to save as plain UUIDv7 in the DB (so you can use UUID datatypes, not strings), but deal with them as type-prefixed strings everywhere else:

```

IMO, a good middleground is using schemes like TypeID[0], ulid[1], or KSUID[2] that provides a more compact and readable (base32) representation and provides better database locality (K-sortable).

[0] https://github.com/jetpack-io/typeid

If you do consider a GUID, I recommend the TypeID library we recently open-sourced. It has typing as part of the id, and it's based on UUIDv7. We think it has a few benefits over other GUIDs, including: + Easier to debug because of the type information + Type-safety can be enforced + Thanks to UUIDv7 is has good locality properties when used as the primary key of a database (unlike a completely random GUID) + We have a dotnet implementation in C# available

If you’re open to a globally unique identifier like UUID, I’d recommend you check out TypeIDs which we recently open sourced https://github.com/jetpack-io/typeid. They are based on the UUIDv7 standard, but add type information (like what Stripe does in their APIs), and we have a TypeScript implementation available.