TL;DR

• The team behind Runes built in a way to programmatically reduce the minimum required number of letters by one character every 17,500 blocks, to prevent name squatting.

Full Story

Is Runes the most interesting and well thought out innovation since the creation of Bitcoin itself?

It just might well be!

We’ve already written about the Rune protocol here and here - and today we’re back to explain why so many of the names of Runes projects are so long and weird.

A quick scroll through Runes on Magic Eden shows names like: DOG•GO•TO•THE•MOON, Z•Z•Z•Z•Z•FEHU•Z•Z•Z•Z•Z and even, ALL•YOUR•TICKERS•SUCK.

So why the long names? Why not something simple like ‘jack’?

The reason is that a minimum name length has been built into the Rune protocol to prevent ‘name squatting.’

(i.e. Using a name that is typically recognized as a brand or trademark with the plan to sell it almost at ransom in the future to that brand at a profit).

Name squatting waves have happened during the .com boom, and pretty much every time a new social platform gains some sort of traction.

To prevent this, the team behind Runes built in a way to programmatically reduce the minimum required number of letters by one character every 17,500 blocks.

This way, if Runes really takes off, by the time ‘Nike’ is available, they will be ready to create a project with that name immediately.

(And if they never take off to the extent that warrants Nike getting involved, well, it doesn’t really matter either way).

Smart system!