muid 0.1.6

Memorable Unique Identifier

muid

Memorable Unique Identifiers

Wait you say ... that's an oxymoron

Memorable unique identifiers are a provocative misnomer. When generating unique identifiers such as privately used keys, memorability is antithetical to uniqueness. MUIDs might be better termed "hash-memorable" identifiers. They form a subset of UUIDs whose SHA-256 hashes are memorable.

Shortcut

Just want to mine? Cut and paste this at the terminal.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microprediction/muid/master/examples/mine_from_venv.sh)"

The script will explain itself, somewhat.

Using the library directly

As per https://muid.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ ...

Install

pip install muid

MUIDs are just like UUIDs (uuid.uuid4)

import muid
key  = muid.muid4(min_len=8)  

Only they take much, much longer to generate because ...

... the SHA-256 hash is memorable

Try this:

print( muid.mhash(key) )    

Don't see it yet? Look closer. Here's an example I just happenned to have lying around:

f01dab1e-ca70-403a-a0c7-00f6c29596c4

And if that isn't clear already, then:

>>print( muid.mnemonic( key ) )
Foldable Cat  

The call muid.mnemonic uses a corpus of readable hex-like scrabble words to infer that only the first 11 characters are intended to be memorable.

Verificaton

muid.verify(key,min_len=7)

Mining

It is trivial to mine for MUIDs.

muid.mine()

At time of writing, mining MUIDs is roughly one order of magnitude more profitable than mining bitcoin even if you use this lousy library to do your mining. With a little work, you should be able to mine with 100x the economics of bitcoin ... at least for a while!

Cashing in

Currently you can sell MUID's by establishing an Algorithmia account at https://algorithmia.com/signup and then supplying MUID's to one of the following buyers.

Difficulty	Bid	Buyer
min_len=11	7c	https://algorithmia.com/algorithms/microprediction/mverify

The difficulty of 11 may be stale. Check muid.MIN_LEN or directly: obtained directly:

min_len = int(requests.get("http://www.microprediction.com/config.json").json()['min_len'])

See also examples/mining_example.py

An example of the use of MUIDs

Memorable unique identifiers are used at www.microprediction.com to circumvent the need to maintain a lookup between private user keys and nom de plume's. New users burn themselves a has-memorable private identity and the memorable part of the hash appears on leaderboards. This prevents excessive churning of keys and identities and the obvious gaming of the system that might occur in its absence.

We hope you have your own uses and would love to hear about them. Many applications can benefit from one less join.

Implementation decisions

We welcome thoughtful suggestions at https://github.com/microprediction/muid/issues or https://algorithmia.com/algorithms/microprediction/mverify/discussion.

Choice of hash

muid.mhash() 

uses SHA-256 hash from hashlib.sha256, then maps the first half to a UUID style string via the uuid.UUID constructor.

Readable hex

The hash produces strings with characters a,b,e,d,e,f plus digits and hyphens.

Memorable.to_readable()

swaps out characters as follows:

Hex	Readable
5	s
1	l
7	t
0	o

This leads to a reasonable but not a huge list of hex-like scrabble words. As an aside, if you enjoy generating words using vowels a,c,e,o and consonants c,b,d,f,s,l,t then please do contribute pull requests for https://github.com/microprediction/muid/blob/master/muid/corpus.py

Collisions (forgettaboutit)

It is well appreciated that approximately 2.71 quintillion uuid4() can be generated before the risk of collision exceeds fifty percent (Wikipedia). Thus UUID collisions are a non-issue. But since an MUID collision requires an underlying collision in UUIDs which are generated while mining, a moment's reflection should convince the reader that the computational capacity required to create MUID collisions over any interval of time is at least as large as the computational capacity employed to create UUID collisions. In short, the thing to worry about is the relatively short supply of MUIDs (an obvious limitation) not collisions between them.