Suggestion: Base64 Image in Token Info JSON

Development Counterparty
1

When initially setting or changing your asset’s (token’s) description, you can enable enhanced functionality (such as an token image and a longer description) by providing a URL to a specially formatted .json file (e.g. http://www.mydomain.com/foo.json) as the description.

http://counterparty.io/docs/enhanced_asset_info/

A link to a 48x48 PNG image can optionally be included in the JSON file. How about also allowing a base64 string representation of the image directly in the JSON?

The advantages are

  • No need to upload the image somewhere
  • Servers won’t need to crawl image urls
  • Image will be immutable with BVAM

The disadvantage is that the base64 string will add about 9000 characters to the JSON file. May be confusing when viewing in a text editor.

Base64 image strings can be encoded online, e.g. here.

2

Yes, that simplifies things.

Format for Enhanced Asset Info would have to be changed, maybe at the same time with BVAM, and then hopefully the both would pass.

Perhaps a “version” field could be added to JSON format to inform Counterblock how to parse the file.

3

You could shorten the length a bit more by taking the hash of the string representation of the image. I started working on that here, http://xcp.ninja/indextest.html