< Handcrafted Integers

~moonsheep

> Have you ever wanted your own integer, one that is uniquely yours and can't be taken away?

Well, there's an easy way to do that! Just generate a random 256-bit number, and derive an ed25519 public key. That public key is your number. Anyone can verify that it's yours (since only you have the secret key with which you can sign messages), but as long as the secret number stays secret no one can take it away!

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~tetris wrote (thread):

Very true, and you'd need to do 2¹³⁰ (~ 10³⁹) operations to even get within a fraction of a fraction of a chance of having a collision[1]!

But the point of this integer server isn't secrecy, it's annotation -- primarily providing a unique integer to a resource that can be uniquely shared over many different projects.... which is something you could also do with a random hash....

Hmm, you've raised a good point and now I feel stupid ;-)

1: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/39641/what-are-the-odds-of-collisions-for-a-hash-function-with-256-bit-output