Only issue damus had with this at one point is people mining pubkeys, so a bunch of people had black colors. Not a huge issue but something to keep in mind. On notedeck I just use bytes near the middle of the key interspersed by a few bytes.
Discussion
almost forgot about the trend of mining pubkeys. although since the majority of users use random pubkeys I think its probably fine.
also this might incentivize users to mine for different numbers than just 0s 😀
How do you do that actually, mining an npub?
check out rana on github. I also saw a project that allows you to do the calculation in a browser but I can't recall the name.
you can do it in nostril as well
You generate random keypairs until you find one that starts with whatever you want it to start with. More characters takes longer time to "mine".
Check out Rana: https://github.com/grunch/rana
More tools here as well: https://github.com/aljazceru/awesome-nostr?tab=readme-ov-file#vanity-pubkey-mining
Thanks, yes I get the process. Mostly looking for tools. This is great.
https://mleku.dev/git/vainstr is a bech32 npub miner that lets you search for keys with a string of valid bech32 characters... there are some limitations, the charset is:
oh crap i broke my reverse proxy fixing the cors header
fixed now... just to figure out how to make it add this to the response lol
not sure how but for some reason the current source of my lerproxy didn't recognise parameters set into the systemd unit but whatever, fixed now... now just to figure out how to set the header!
so, i have a director, which i specifically added the feature of an x-forwarded-for header so the reverse proxy would pass forward the origin and my relay looks for this header and uses it preferentially to identify the source of a request
but i think that this cors thing is on the other end, not on the inbound connection but needs to modify headers on the ressponses
i'm not very familiar with http voodoo but i did manage to add that forwarding address header... this can't be that hard
pubkeys are hex, so you just mine private keys that will generate pubkeys with x leading zeroes... but since npubs appeared, people started mining vanity npubs instead
https://mleku.dev/git/vainstr is an example of a vanity miner, it only targets bech32 strings though, you can see in mine it ends with mleku
took about 4 days to get that
my key was mined at the other end to make a 5 letter word same as my username... i'd be curious to see what bech32 "mleku" is as a colour
a colour is about a 4 days mine, for a decent computer... it's still reasonable limitation on impersonators if they don't get the right colour
black is still a valid colour and how many people "pow mined" for more than 3 bytes of zeroes? this takes literally weeks, times more weeks, for each additional byte