Re: [dispatch] Finding a home for Multibase and Multihash

[Volker Mische <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

I'm Volker Mische and work for Protocol Labs. I've been in the 
decentralized web space for about 5 years, before that in databases. 
I've been involved in Multibase and Multihash during those 5 years.

I'm one of the maintainers of `rust-multihash` [1] and `rust-multibase` 
[2]. Am happy to provide feedback during the standardization process and 
update the implementations accordingly.

My interest in Multihash is not only due to my professional involvement 
at Protocol Labs, but I also see fit outside of the projects Protocol 
Labs is building/supporting. I e.g. also proposed using Multihash in the 
hash extension of the STAC catalog standard [3], which was accepted. 
They were in need of a solution that Multihash provides: identifying a 
hash. Having this standardized would be great, as then people wouldn't 
need to come up with their own solutions.

For future uses of Multhash I could imagine a Multihash-enabled checksum 
tool. You wouldn't need to know which hash functions was used to create 
the checksums (e.g. if the filename is lost), but you could directly 
derive it from the checksum itself.

[1]: https://github.com/multiformats/rust-multihash/
[2]: https://github.com/multiformats/rust-multibase/
[3]: 
https://github.com/stac-extensions/file/blob/2d9b80e0e6b81e5d9983635b794aa89990b7f480/README.md#checksums

Cheers,
   Volker