A commonly held view is that Satoshi Nakamoto invented Base58 encoding for Bitcoin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base58
However, a Flickr discussion about Base58 encoded URLs exists from April 2009: https://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157616713786392/
Did Flickr deploy their Base58 encoded URLs before the Bitcoin white paper was published on Oct 31, 2008?