recently I was given a file with some (proposedly) Ethereum addresses in it. To my suprise the addresses looked like this:
6W0uRUw0RbRbMAVaAH5iNWiTdzA=
Byu1WPliGqxo5VCIZ0XNXX1pqe8=
2hsZhEtm52rGdBv6MKwEYp0DaCQ=
W1b343pgQ8RUG026YHsLAS8n7sg=
e/2DRK4AOua89U5zoH5FKtdtb/U=
ekJKCCvYKwhppNMkxL4P2y2I8O4=
...while Ethereum addresses are usually always represented by a 42-character hexadecimal
0x6D0Aef62e321Cf1AFB74A4A305f380d9f5c34c8A
such that a regex like: r'^(0x[a-fA-F0-9]{40})$' should match the address.
Actually a collegue mentioned by doing the following (in Python)
import base64
"0x" + base64.b64decode("6W0uRUw0RbRbMAVaAH5iNWiTdzA=").hex()
you actually end up with the regular Ethereum address representation.
Now my question is the following:
Is there any information, what this (shorter) representation is called or why it is used? OR could it just be, that the addresses were base64 encoded just to save some space, and this is not a regular occurance at all? (and maybe not recommended)?
I couln´t really find anything useful out there so I´d be very glad if somebody knows anything about this.
