On the contrary, having the right to assign IDs is powerful; on balance, to my mind the right thing to do is some sort of a ZK verifiable random function, e.g. sunspot-based transformations combined with some proof of ‘fair’ random choice. In that case, I think the 800 bit number seems like plenty. You could also do some sort of epoch-based variable length, where for the next billion years or so, we use 1/256 of the ID space, (forced first bit to 0), and so on.
(Gotta say here that I love HN. It's one of the very few places where a comment that geeky and pedantic can nonetheless be on point. :-)
From now until protons decay and matter does not exist anymore is only 10^56 nanoseconds.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260215225537.h...
Two quarks inside the proton interact via a massive messenger particle. This exchange flips their identity, turning the proton into a positron and a neutral pion. The pion then immediately converts into gamma rays.
Proton decayed!
If a CPU takes 4 cycles to generate a UUID and the CPU runs at 4 GHz it churns out one every nanosecond.
These are only namespaces. Many worlds can have all the same (many) random numbers and they will never conflict with each other!
You just had to collapse my wave function here…
Conservation of mass and energy is an empirical observation, there is no theoretical basis for it. We just don't know any process we can implement that violates it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Pedantry ftw.
If it takes at least Npb particles to store one bit of information, then the number of addressable things would decrease with the number of bits of the address.
So let's call Nthg the number of addressable things, and assume the average number of bits per address grows with Nb = f(Ntng).
Then the maximum number of addressable things is the number that satisfies Nthg = Np/(Npb*f(Ntng)), where Np is the total number of particles.
I build a whole database around the idea of using the smallest plausible random identifiers, because that seems to be the only "golden disk" we have for universal communication, except for maybe some convergence property of latent spaces with large enough embodied foundation models.
It's weird that they are really under appreciated in the scientific data management and library science community, and many issues that require large organisations at the moment could just have been better identifiers.
To me the ship of Theseus question is about extrinsic (random / named) identifiers vs. intrinsic (hash / embedding) identifiers.
https://triblespace.github.io/triblespace-rs/deep-dive/ident...
https://triblespace.github.io/triblespace-rs/deep-dive/tribl...
Received Message
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Subject: URGENT UPDATE
Looks like this multispecies universe has centrally-agreed-upon path addressing system.
Timestamp + random seems like it could be a good tradeoff to reduce the ID sizes and still get reasonable characteristics, I'm surprised the article didn't explore there (but then again "timestamps" are a lot more nebulous at universal scale I suppose). Just spitballing here but I wonder if it would be worthwhile to reclaim ten bits of the Snowflake timestamp and use the low 32 bits for a random number. Four billion IDs for each second.
There's a Tom Scott video [2] that describes Youtube video IDs as 11-digit base-64 random numbers, but I don't see any official documentation about that. At the end he says how many IDs are available but I don't think he considers collisions via the birthday paradox.
Isn't this just the same scheme as version 1 UUID, except with half the bits? I guess they didn't want to dedicate 128 bits to their IDs.
Apparently with the birthday paradox 32 bit random IDs only allow some tens of thousands per second before collision chance passes 50%. Maybe that's acceptable?
Also, network routing requires objects that have multiple addresses.
Physics side of whole thing is funny too, afaik quantum particles require fungibility, i.e. by doxxing atoms you unavoidably change the behavior of the system.
There's nothing stopping a entity from requesting multiple IDs from one of the "devices"!
One upside of the deterministic schemes is they include provenance/lineage. Can literally "trace up" the path the history back to the original ID giver.
Kinda has me curious about how much information is required to represent any arbitrary provenance tree/graph on a network of N-nodes/objects (entirely via the self-described ID)?
(thinking in the comment: I guess if worst case linear chain, and you assume that the information of the full provenance should be accessible by the id, that scales as O(N x id_size), so its quite bad. But, assuming "best case" (that any node is expected to be log(N) steps from root, depth of log(N)) feels like global_id_size = log(N) x local_id_size is roughly the optimal limit? so effectively the size of the global_id grows as log(N)^2? Would that mean: from the 399 bit number, with lineage, would be a lower limit for a global_id_size be like (400 bit)^2 ~= 20 kB (because of carrying the ordered-local-id provenance information, and not relative to local shared knowledge)
Provenance is a DAG, so you get a partial order for free by topological sort. That can be extended to a compatible total order. Then provenance for a node is just its ordering. This kind of mapping from objects to the first N consecutive naturals is also a minimal perfect hash function, which have n log n overhead. We can't navigate the tree to track ancestry, but equality implies identical ancestry.
Alternatively, we could track the whole history in somewhat more bits with a succinct encoding, 2N if it's a binary tree.
In practice, deterministic IDs usually accept a 2^-N collision risk to get log n.
Each “post” has a CID, which is a cryptographic hash of the data. To “prove” ownership of the post, there’s a witness hash that is sent that can be proved all the way up the tree to the repo root hash, which is signed with the root key.
Neat way of having data say “here’s the data, and if you care to verify it, here’s an MST”.
- Infinity : from school, we learn our universe is infinite.
- We often do calculation with upper limit like this one : 10^240. This is a big number butttttt it's not infinite you know. 10^240+1, 10^240+2...
So :
1. if it's infinite, why doing upper limit calculation ?
2. if it's limited, what is there outside that limit ?
Extremly paradoxal