How Landemic Works – Landemic
For an overview of the Plus Code addressing system, visit the Plus Codes website. For a detailed description, visit the Wikipedia entry on the synonymous Open Location Code.
Landemic tiles are limited to just the first 8 characters and the plus sign of a Plus Code:
The first decision on the Landemic format was between a fixed code length or letting users choose tiles of any size. We chose a fixed code length to streamline the interface. If our goal is to provide provable scarcity, then tiles should not overlap with other tiles. Furthermore, viewing tile ownerships of differing sizes would require different zoom levels, which would break the simplicity of having one map to view all tiles.
The second decision was on the code length. 8 characters is a city-block-sized unit. For example, the block that contains the Empire State Building is between 100% and 50% the area of the 8-character Plus Code that covers it. Choosing this tile size makes it satisfying to purchase popular attractions with one tile.
If tiles are too small, and if we are sticking with the principle of “one tile, one token”, then it requires too much Ethereum gas to acquire a meaningful portion of territory. If the tiles are too large, then the prices become less informational.
The 8-character code length means that Manhattan is roughly comprised of 800 tiles, the United States 130 million, and the world 25.6 billion. If you take the top 125 cities by population and combine their land area, you get 194,954 km², or roughly 2.6 million tiles.
The characters of Plus Codes are written in base 20:
Each tile is one ERC-721 token. The ID of the token is a 256-bit, unsigned integer, but we are only concerned with using the first 9 bytes (72 bits). The 9 bytes are used for the ASCII-representation of each of the base 20 digits, in upper-case, in addition to the plus sign.
In 2013, what3words released an addressing system that was an attempt to assign “IP addresses” to real-world locations. Every 3m x 3m square of land received a unique three-word name. For example, the room or desk where you’re reading this article now has an address like dragon.luck.soap. The addressing system is now being used to deliver packages with drones to rural areas and to help identify the location of refugee settlements in Uganda.
Fast-forward to 2018, and the world hadn’t switched from street addresses to what3words. Enter Google. Last year, Google soft-launched a new grid system, Open Location Code (a.k.a. Plus Codes), to all of Google Maps. Now, whenever you open Google Maps, you’ll see not only street addresses but a short, alphanumeric string representing that location:
Why is Google doing this? Currently, there are no killer apps based on Plus Codes, but it seems that Google would rather win the standard war before an alternative grid-system, like what3words, gets off the ground. Because of the widespread adoption of Google Maps, Google’s move means we’re all going to Plus Codes, for better or worse. Fortunately, Google made Plus Codes non-proprietary, meaning developers like us can make all sorts of apps based on it.
Published at Sat, 29 Jun 2019 19:11:15 +0000
