whats the point of uuids instead of straight counting upwards ids

[Waru]

so presumably you would use a uuid to know who a certain account is, etc without name changes or anything. Minecraft (which uses uuids) are able to see the uuid so it's nothing like an auth key. what are the benefits of a uuid vs a normal incremental id like blockland has? do the uuids have inherent properties? I'm not well versed in this so any explanation would help

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[Super Suit 12]

I have no loving clue and now I'm curious

[Spartan923]

Only thing i can think of would be security / privacy

[Waru]

Only thing i can think of would be security / privacy

but a minecraft server knows your uuid, same as a blockland server knows your blockland id. Also they're (mostly) completely randomly generated now, but a random generation that doesnt repeat is still just as quantitative as 1, 2, 3, etc.

[Foxscotch]

they are useful when you need something to be, you know, universally unique. there is a difference between universally unique, and unique to your application
they also make sharding simpler

neither of these seem likely to be a real concern for minecraft, at least at the time they'd have made that decision, so notch probably chose to do it that way for no particular reason

[Ipquarx]

You get the same problems that have happened over here on blockland like ID discrimination. People obsessing over uncontrollable numbers just because there is some semblance of order to them.

You also run into things like the German Tank Problem where you can estimate the number of sales of a particular product by looking at randomly selected incremental product IDs. (It doesn't take many to get an accurate number!) Sales numbers are obviously private business stuff, so you want to hide that as best as possible, and completely random UUIDs are one of the solutions.

There's also the problem of distributing the IDs through different systems. Blockland does this rather messily, for example 2-6k IDs are sold through various online retailers, all IDs below 98,304 are non-steam keys and ones above that are for steam. Having completely randomly generated UUID's negates this problem entirely.