Symbols

[casey]

Should inscriptions have short, unique names?

Idea:

An inscription can contain a symbol, which is a u64. The u64 is mapped to a string of upper-case characters A-Z using the same algorithm as ordinal names. The first inscription in the chain to declare a symbol gets it. If a later inscription has a duplicate symbol, it behaves as if it has no symbol.

Knowing which inscription has which symbol requires a full node, since you have to see all previous inscriptions, which requires indexing every transaction.

To prevent short symbols being taken quickly, only allow symbols if the ordinal with that name has already been mined. So symbols would have the same supply schedule as ordinals.

Allow linking to inscriptions by name with /NAME