[hashcash] Re: Length of recent X-Hashcash cookies?

On 2004-12-15T20:30:02+0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Hi.  I have been using X-Hashcash for a while, but the recent cookies
> are long (>80 characters), which look quite ugly.  I know this is not
> a violation of any specification, but that doesn't mean they don't
> look any less ugly.
> 
> Anyone care about this?

Sure; I don't like the counter field very much at all.  Others, however,
feel that the counter field provides useful information, and/or that it
helps to prevent collisions.

As I recall, the excessive leading 0's are a result of sha1 block sizes.
Not much can be done about that without slowing down minting.

> Could leading '0' in the last field be removed, for instance?

They could be, but doing so would remove the nice property that stamps
can be checked without any modification.

> PS.  This message has a cookie for a gmane.org newsgroup.  This is
> because Gnus doesn't handle X-Hashcash in news->mail gateways
> properly.  If someone has any suggestion how it should work, that
> would be appreciated.

Is there a mapping of gmane newsgroup names to mailing list addresses
anywhere?  If so, that could be consulted to determine the proper stamp
resource.

> PPS.  How about renaming X-Hashcash: to Hashcash:?  The 'X-' prefix
> also look ugly, and was only discussed in RFC 822, not in the current
> RFC 2822.

I thought all unofficial headers are supposed to be prefixed by 'X-'.

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