References

PAGE STATUS: early draft

A reference is a pointer from one record to another.

Mosaic defines two kinds of references

Id Reference

An id reference is a pointer to an exact record with no provision for replacement or edits. It contains some hash of the message making it unique. See record for the Id field.

Address Reference

An address reference ^rat is a pointer to a group of records that have the same address, which usually represent an initial record and it's subsequent replacements, often (and by default presumably) with the most recent record superceding the older records.

An address consists of four fields which are contiguous and in order in the record layout at [128:176] making up 48 bytes.

• The original timestamp (6 bytes) in big-endian,
• The kind (2 bytes),
• The the author's public key (32 bytes),
• The random nonce (8 bytes),

An author can replace a record by creating a new record with the same address, in which case the address is copied (the nonce is not randomly generated). Replaced records must then contain the same author key and be of the same kind, and refer to the original timestamp. They may however be signed by a different signing keypair or have their flags modified, their tags changed, and their content changed.

The timestamp of a replacement record MUST be larger than the original timestamp in the address.