in reply to How safe is truncating an MD5 digest string?
This estimate is off because it disregards the possibility of multiple collisions, which cannot be discounted if overall a single collision becomes reasonably likely. A substantially less naive approximation uses the Poisson distribution, and says that the probability of a collision is 1 - exp(-$m*$n/$N). This is off becaue it discounts the extent to which $m guesses exhausts the overall search space, which effect in this case affects the result a few decimal places down, but does not matter.
That estimate is therefore the one you should quote in estimating the effort it would take to create a probability of compromising your system.
Personally I would use the 64-bit representation and do a tr to convert the two non-URL safe characters to URL-safe ones. Sure it might be overkill. But it is extra safety for free, why not take it?
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