TIP-101: Succinct canonical token names

[nullchinchilla]

TIP	101
Category	Notational standards (1xx)
Author	Eric Tung eric@themelio.org

Summary

Right now, other than the built-in tokens SYM, MEL, and ERG, all other tokens don't have canonical "ticker symbols". This TIP strives to provide a notation for succinctly referring to custom tokens in an unambiguous, verifiable way.

Motivation

There is no way right now to unambiguously refer to a custom token, except by a long and unwieldy 256-bit hash. This may not seem such a big problem --- Ethereum AFAIK has the same issue, and in practice people will assign "conventional" names to popular custom tokens.

The problem here is really security: given two tokens, both with big hash blobs as their token names, which one is the "real", say, WETH? A solution to this is human-readable canonical token names that are unique to each token, looking something like X-ROSVAGKUBBIG instead of 9f6579e66c18b661fb51b08e1011d30ad1f8d7324a82b59525597e094ec9d9f9

Proposed changes

We define a new pronounceable encoding of any nonnegative integer. We define a set of syllables, consisting of all syllables of the form CV or CVC, where

• C is one of the following consonants: "p", "t", "k", "b", "d", "g", "f", "s", "h", "v", "z", "r", "l", "w", "y", "c", "q",
• V is one of the following vowels: "a", "e", "i", "o", "u"

We then assign a number to each of these syllables by their index when sorted alphabetically. Then, the pronounceable encoding of an integer is just a little-endian encoding where the "digits" are syllables from this list.

To produce the succinct encoding of a custom token, we follow these steps:

• Let height and index be the location where the transaction that created the custom token was confirmed. For example, if the token-creating transaction is the 3rd transaction (i.e., the transaction with the third-smallest nosig hash) at block 100000, then height = 100000, index = 3.
• Compute unique_number = pi(height, index) using the (Cantor pairing function)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pairing_function], which gives a unique integer that encodes a pair of integers.
• Then, the custom token name is X- appended to the pronounceable encoding of unique_number.

For example, a token made by the 3rd transaction of 100000 would have name X-ZOCDAKKOSBAB

Deployment

TBD