3 ms·
There are so many more variations in a hash. Hashes are case sensitive to their original input. "Hacker News" would be different from "hacker news", different
by daenz 14y ago
There are so many more variations in a hash. Hashes are case sensitive to their original input. "Hacker News" would be different from "hacker news", different from "hackernews." The scarcity disappears.
You can also use entire documents as pointers to domains, something you can't do with the existing system.
- sp332 14y agoihackernews.com and hckrnews.com don't seem to have any trouble with scarcity. And really, how could I tell "Hacker news" apart from "hacker news"? They're not scarce but they're basically indistinguishable. And if you're going to copy-paste a whole document, you might as well use a domain name encoder like https://www.nic.sh/cgi-bin/idn https://www.nic.sh/cgi-bin/idn instead of a hash and get a normal-looking URL.
- daenz 14y agoI think you are missing the point of the document pointer. The domain name would be based on the content of the document, not the document name. Any document can be boiled down to a hash. > And really, how could I tell "Hacker news" apart from "hacker news"? They're not scarce but they're basically indistinguishable. The same way you can tell if something is spelled correctly or not. :)