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> So first I would suggest some sort of global service for translating user friendly names to internet addresses. You can't do this without having a central au

> So first I would suggest some sort of global service for translating user friendly names to internet addresses. You can't do this without having a central authority (which people don't want to be beholden to), making names cost money (or be otherwise difficult), or accepting squatters. People aren't going to pay for names and you've gained nothing if you centralize the name store. People aren't going to accept the immobility of federation like they do with email (and it still gravitates towards centralized authorities). I think we're just going to have to accept large hard-to-gen and hard-to-read identities (e.g. base32'd pub keys like onion service names) and we each "tag" friendly names to them locally as we choose.

jessaustin 9y ago
If you can share those tags (and why not?), now you have decentralized "authorities" for names. "Squatting" is only a problem if someone else can take an identity after I've used it within the service. Squatting on previously-unused-in-the-service IRL identities doesn't matter at all.
- kodablah 9y ago
  > If you can share those tags (and why not?), now you have decentralized "authorities" for names. Until an indexing service becomes a defacto standard, once again making it centralized. This is what I meant about federation (i.e. sharing your name lists) gravitating towards centralization. > Squatting on previously-unused-in-the-service IRL identities doesn't matter at all. It does when I can register thousands and thousands of names. This is why it must be too difficult for squatters and not too difficult for users.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    There isn't a point to generating thousands and thousands of UUIDs, but it's only the UUIDs that need to be reserved after use. The human-readable names needn't be universal. If too many of your tags point to squatters, then no one will want to share them.

jessaustin 9y ago

If you can share those tags (and why not?), now you have decentralized "authorities" for names. "Squatting" is only a problem if someone else can take an identity after I've used it within the service. Squatting on previously-unused-in-the-service IRL identities doesn't matter at all.

kodablah 9y ago
> If you can share those tags (and why not?), now you have decentralized "authorities" for names. Until an indexing service becomes a defacto standard, once again making it centralized. This is what I meant about federation (i.e. sharing your name lists) gravitating towards centralization. > Squatting on previously-unused-in-the-service IRL identities doesn't matter at all. It does when I can register thousands and thousands of names. This is why it must be too difficult for squatters and not too difficult for users.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  There isn't a point to generating thousands and thousands of UUIDs, but it's only the UUIDs that need to be reserved after use. The human-readable names needn't be universal. If too many of your tags point to squatters, then no one will want to share them.