 Countable membership coding

A countable well-founded relation that is an extensional relation codes a transitive set through the Mostowski collapse theorem. Adding a distinguished point selects one decoded set. Every hereditarily countable set has such a code by enumerating its transitive membership ancestry. There are only continuum many codes. In ZFC, selecting least codes in a well-order gives an injection of the hereditarily countable sets into a set of size $2^{{\aleph }_0}$.