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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

Is there any efficiency benefit to blockchain vs just storing a unique ID for every item, so that even a stack of coins has a stack of UIDs?

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Consider the sheer scale: people sell 200 million UO gold for $10. Can you imagine every gold piece having a unique UUID? Even if you didn’t use 256 bit hashes, even at 64 bits you’d be talking about 1.6gb per $10 worth of UO gold.

UXTO would’ve been a neat technology to have to experiment with at least.

Memory was at enough of a premium that even in the tagging system we made in the article it was just for the rarest items.

Could you mux the data of the coins?

If you have a stack of gold containing 5 uuid and mix it with another stack of 3 uuid but only support 5 uuid per stack. Then calculate proportional weightings which 5 you store.

You could probably find a way to try and wash the money but I think it could be done with right heuristics to catch a good majority of use cases but maybe not all.

I just want to note that I only started paying attention to cryptography after I left UO and got into Bitcoin, which sounds like an NFT-grifting MMO supervillain origin story - I know - but I sure did learn a lot about merkle trees and solving interesting social problems.

Are 1 UO gold coins even individually addressable?

No, stacks are stacks. They’re an object id with a quantity counter. Each stack, however, was capable of holding its own separate script and objvars; there were event triggers to handle special cases like “onStackAdd” and such.

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