uport-project / mnid Goto Github PK

Hey, This is a great initiative 👍 to self describing opaque strings :)

@kumavis asked @diasdavid and I on IRC to take a look at this and give some feedback, so i figured i'd start an issue for discussion.

It seems what we're really doing here is coming up with a scheme for encoding PKI identities (an ethereum address being roughly the hash of a public key).

Some initial things i want to consider:

• What would an address on bitcoin look like? How would that be represented?
• How difficult would it be to represent an ipfs peer ID with this format?
• Do you think the checksum could be optional? i.e. allow un-checksummed mnids ?
• The version byte should probably be a varint, this allows future extensibility
• The network IDs should be in a table somewhere, that way people using this spec don't overlap on their selections
• Using a segment of the genesis block hash seems like a nice idea, but i would be worried about the possibility of a collision if this spec becomes more adopted. A global table seems the better approach
• The hash function used for the checksum at the end should be specified by the version (version 1 == sha3, version2 maybe something different if sha3 breaks?). Hardcoding these things always makes me nervous
• Consider using multibase instead of strictly base58. Some applications might want a case insensitive encoding (like filenames on non-linux OSes)

When the mnid object imported from the dependency I get undefined.

import mnid, {decode} from 'mnid'
console.log(mnid)
console.log(decode)

*console output*

undefined
ƒ decode(encoded) {
  var data = _buffer.Buffer.from(base58.decode(encoded));
  var netLength = data.length - 24;
  var version = data.slice(0, 1);
  var network = data.slice(1, netLength);
  var addre…

I presume this is just a Webpack/ES6 import bug for bundling (personally I don't feel digging in)? To be safe would it make sense to add export default object exporting the functions?

export default {
 checksum,
 encode,
 decode,
 isMNID
}