cryptocoin address generation - ruby

Recently have been looking at crypto currencies, mostly Bitcoin and Dogecoin. I'm using this source for my project. I've got Bitcoin to work perfectly, and since the Bitcoin gem did not have native support for Dogecoin I had to self-implement it.
Also noticed that another githubber had opened tried to implement dogecoin support, which as of now did not generating address correctly.
The problem seems to be in this particular line. (corresponding to the format of the crypto address)
:address_version => "30"
:address_version = PUBKEY_ADDRESS in base58.h
base58.h
PUBKEY_ADRESS contains value 30.
Specifying this particular number will give address beginning with letter 'L' (litecoin address), where Dogecoin requires 'D'.
Does this have anything to do with Doge using scrypt, I have no technical expertise in this field. How do I go about generating dogecoin pubkey/private key pair?

30 in decimal will give you a address begins with a letter D
30 in hexadecimal (48 in decimal) will give you a address begins with letter L
I think that bitcoin-ruby first changes PUBKEY_ADDRESS from hexa to decimal so :address_version should be 1E (30 in decimal)

Related

create a URL shortener with Base 62?

I understood the process to shorten the URL with base 62 at How do I create a URL shortener?.
Steps given are
Think of an alphabet we want to use. In your case, that's [a-zA-Z0-9]. It contains 62 letters.
Take an auto-generated, unique numerical key (the auto-incremented id of a MySQL table for example).
For this example, I will use 12510 (125 with a base of 10).
Now you have to convert 12510 to X62 (base 62)
My question is why not just create unique numerical key and return it ? What is the advantage of concerting numerical key > Base 62 > then Finally some alphanumeric number ?
Is it because final alphanumeric number will be much smaller than unique numerical key ?
Yes. The idea is to make it short and usable in a URL. A number in base 62 will use fewer characters than the same number in base 10. Notice also that URL shorteners use short hosts, such as g.co.
I can see you understand that, yes, a number written in base 62 takes less characters than a number in base 10 just like a number in base 10 takes less characters than a number in base 2 (e.g. 0101 is 3 characters longer than just '5').
So, I'll answer specifically "Why".
Sometimes a link is shortened to be more visually pleasing. A company worried about their public perception likely doesn't want their links to look like an error code due to how long they are so they resort to shortening. That's why some url shortening services allow you to add your own "vanity url" which customizes the domain name, so that a link can be shortened and branded.
Other times a link is shortened to minimize character count when working with constraints, like Twitter. For example, at my company we shortened the links in our automated Twilio messages because SMS messages that contain more than 160 characters are technically 2 concatenated messages so it is more expensive to send.
And finally if the link is being shared through a medium that cannot be directly clicked on (e.g. verbally, on paper), making it shorter makes it much easier to type into an address bar manually. (Imagine trying to type the url to this SO question when someone is reading it to you.) I assume this is also at least partially why the base used for these links usually stop at around 62. If you start including other arbitrary characters to higher the base and consequentially make the link marginally shorter, it'll become harder to communicate, read and type. ("domain.name/5omeC0d3" vs "domian.name/🈲}♠ "

Convert to E164 only if possible?

Can I determine if the user entered a phone number that can be safely formatted into E164?
For Germany, this requires that the user started his entry with a local area code. For example, 123456 may be a subscriber number in his city, but it cannot be formatted into E164, because we don't know his local area code. Then I would like to keep the entry as it is. In contrast, the input 089123456 is independent of the area code and could be formatted into E164, because we know he's from Germany and we could convert this into +4989123456.
You can simply convert your number into E164 using libphonenumber
and after conversion checks if both the strings are same or not. If they're same means a number can not be formatted, otherwise the number you'll get from library will be formatted in E164.
Here's how you can convert
PhoneNumberUtil phoneUtil = PhoneNumberUtil.getInstance();
String formattedNumber = phoneUtil.format(inputNumber, PhoneNumberFormat.E164);
Finally compare formattedNumber with inputNumber
It looks as though you'll need to play with isValidNumber and isPossibleNumber for your case. format is certainly not guaranteed to give you something actually dialable, see the javadocs. This is suggested by the demo as well, where formatting is not displayed when isValidNumber is false.
I also am dealing with this FWIW. In the context of US numbers: The issue is I'd like to parse using isPossibleNumber in order to be as lenient as possible, and store the number in E164. However then we accept, e.g. +15551212. This string itself even passes isPossibleNumber despite clearly (I think) not being dialable anywhere.

On-the-fly bank account numbers verification

Today I had to copy a bank account number from a real (dead tree) letter to an Emacs buffer and then send it by email. And I made a mistake while copying it from the letter to the Emacs buffer (forgot one digit). Which resulted in one email from a coworker telling me: "couldn't make the payment, bogus IBAN".
How hard would it be to create a function/minor-mode that would:
detect "things" that do look like an IBAN (for example two uppercase letters followed by between 'x' and 'y' digits, ignoring spaces etc. There are ready-to-use regexps out there that verify if something looks like an IBAN or not)
run a mod 97 and highlight the IBAN in red if it looks invalid
Ideally I'd need a minor-mode that I could turn on for several types of buffers (silly text files, but also email, etc.).
What would be the "approach" to use to do that using Emacs?
You can easily use something like
(font-lock-add-keywords nil
'(("[A-Z][A-Z][0-9]\\{x,y\\}"
(0 (if (eq (mod blabla 97) foo) nil 'font-lock-warning-face))))))
Just fill in the blabla.

iphone's phone number splitting algorithm?

iPhone has a pretty good telephone number splitting function, for example:
Singapore mobile: +65 9852 4135
Singapore resident line: +65 6325 6524
China mobile: +86 135-6952-3685
China resident line: +86 10-65236528
HongKong: +886 956-238-82
USA: +1 (732) 865-3286
Notice the nice features here:
- the splitting of country code, area code, and the rest is automatic;
- the delimiter is also nicely adopted to different countries, e.g. "()", "-" and space.
Note the parsing logic is doable to me, however, I don't know where to get the knowledge of most countries' telephone number format.
where could i found such knowledge, or an open source code that implemented it?
You can get similar functionality with the libphonenumber code library.
Interestingly enough, you cannot use an NSNumberFormatter for this, but you can write your own custom class for it. Just create a new class, set properties such as countryCode, areaCode and number, and then create a method that formats the number based on the countryCode.
Here's a great example: http://the-lost-beauty.blogspot.com/2010/01/locale-sensitive-phone-number.html
As an aside: a friend told me about a gigantic regular expression he had to maintain that could pick telephone numbers out of intercepted communications from hundreds of countries around the world. It was very non-trivial.
Thankfully your problem is easier, as you can just have a table with the per-country formats:
format[usa] = "+d (ddd) ddd-dddd";
format[hk] = "+ddd ddd-ddd-dd";
format[china_mobile] = "+dd ddd-dddd-dddd";
...
Then when you're printing, you simply output one digit from the phone number string in each d spot as needed. This assumes you know the country, which is a safe enough assumption for telephone devices -- pick "default" formats for the few surrounding countries.
Since some countries have different formats with different lengths you might need to store your table with additional information:
format[germany][10] = "..."
format[germany][11] = "....."

Ruby on Rails - generating bit.ly style identifiers

I'm trying to generate UUIDs with the same style as bit.ly urls like:
http://bit [dot] ly/aUekJP
or cloudapp ones:
http://cl [dot] ly/1hVU
which are even smaller
how can I do it?
I'm now using UUID gem for ruby but I'm not sure if it's possible to limitate the length and get something like this.
I am currently using this:
UUID.generate.split("-")[0] => b9386070
But I would like to have even smaller and knowing that it will be unique.
Any help would be pretty much appreciated :)
edit note: replaced dot letters with [dot] for workaround of banned short link
You are confusing two different things here. A UUID is a universally unique identifier. It has a very high probability of being unique even if millions of them were being created all over the world at the same time. It is generally displayed as a 36 digit string. You can not chop off the first 8 characters and expect it to be unique.
Bitly, tinyurl et-al store links and generate a short code to represent that link. They do not reconstruct the URL from the code they look it up in a data-store and return the corresponding URL. These are not UUIDS.
Without knowing your application it is hard to advise on what method you should use, however you could store whatever you are pointing at in a data-store with a numeric key and then rebase the key to base32 using the 10 digits and 22 lowercase letters, perhaps avoiding the obvious typo problems like 'o' 'i' 'l' etc
EDIT
On further investigation there is a Ruby base32 gem available that implements Douglas Crockford's Base 32 implementation
A 5 character Base32 string can represent over 33 million integers and a 6 digit string over a billion.
If you are working with numbers, you can use the built in ruby methods
6175601989.to_s(30)
=> "8e45ttj"
to go back
"8e45ttj".to_i(30)
=>6175601989
So you don't have to store anything, you can always decode an incoming short_code.
This works ok for proof of concept, but you aren't able to avoid ambiguous characters like: 1lji0o. If you are just looking to use the code to obfuscate database record IDs, this will work fine. In general, short codes are supposed to be easy to remember and transfer from one medium to another, like reading it on someone's presentation slide, or hearing it over the phone. If you need to avoid characters that are hard to read or hard to 'hear', you might need to switch to a process where you generate an acceptable code, and store it.
I found this to be short and reliable:
def create_uuid(prefix=nil)
time = (Time.now.to_f * 10_000_000).to_i
jitter = rand(10_000_000)
key = "#{jitter}#{time}".to_i.to_s(36)
[prefix, key].compact.join('_')
end
This spits out unique keys that look like this: '3qaishe3gpp07w2m'
Reduce the 'jitter' size to reduce the key size.
Caveat:
This is not guaranteed unique (use SecureRandom.uuid for that), but it is highly reliable:
10_000_000.times.map {create_uuid}.uniq.length == 10_000_000
The only way to guarantee uniqueness is to keep a global count and increment it for each use: 0000, 0001, etc.

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