# Moving away from UUIDs – Neil Madden

<https://neilmadden.blog/2018/08/30/moving-away-from-uuids/>

- Host: [neilmadden.blog](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/neilmadden.blog/)
- Saved: November 22, 2022 (2022-11-23T03:14:13Z)
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## What Jamie wrote

Madden has a delightful post going into depth on the "guessability" of UUIDs. UUIDs are used all over the place in so many systems. They solve a really important issue for programmers, creating a (nearly) guaranteed random number. 

But Madden goes to work to see how long it would take to guess a UUID and, uh oh, it could be 35 minutes. 

> My recommendation is to use a 160-bit (20 byte) random value that is then URL-safe base64-encoded. The URL-safe base64 variant can be used pretty much anywhere, and is reasonably compact.

That takes 17.9 million years to guess. More than 35 minutes… 🤓

## Facts

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## Appears in

- [WT235: Weekly Thing #235 / TikTok, Busy, Stories](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/235/), Notable

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://neilmadden.blog/2018/08/30/moving-away-from-uuids/