Introducing: MIOTA.me, a Decentralized IOTA Address Shortener
From 81 characters seed
Create a short URL for your IOTA address to share it on social media in a decentralized and secure way by using the tangle. Not dependent on a single website and easy to verify.
MIOTA.me was developed so you can share addresses in an easy and convenient way on social medias or anywhere.
So that this service is not centralized, a random tag must be generated to find the address in the tangle.
But there is a problem, how can you protect yourself from others simply sending a new transaction with the same tag, but to a different address?
Our first approach was to do it with timestamps by using the transaction with the oldest timestamp, but since they weren’t sure if it was really safe, they we asked different suggestions on the #development channel in the IOTA Discord. https://discord.gg/fNGZXvh)
It is not safe to use timestamps because they are not enforced, and you can easily create transactions with older timestamps.
So this is was the problem, how can you store and get an address with only a few characters in the tangle without it being centralized or insecure? You use the checksum of the address as tag!
The checksum consists of the last 9 trytes of an address with 90 trytes as used in Trinity. In Trinity it is also colored to make it easier to recognize.
The checksum allows the creator of a short URL to see if the URL matches his address — the trytes must be exactly the same as the checksum, if so, the creator can share the URL.
If now someone wants to send a transaction to the Short URL generated, the checksum should match the URL. When it matches, the user can be pretty certain that it is the correct address and that the website has not simply returned a wrong address. What are the odds of a collision?
There are 27⁹ (7 625 597 484 987), that’s over 7 trillion different checksums! It would be incredibly difficult to brute force a second address with the same checksum, and in this case, there would be a second matching address in the tangle, therefore the website should not return any address at all. This probably won’t happen anyway, but if it does, the creator should simply generate a new short URL with a new/different address.
