I'm really hoping that if we ever see something like FaaS, it wouldn't be the majority of average users using such services, but rather more for businesses or h

I'm really hoping that if we ever see something like FaaS, it wouldn't be the majority of average users using such services, but rather more for businesses or high-profile individuals. If, as an average user, you pick something unique to you for identifying yourself on the network (maybe your personal email address?), others have little to no interest in competing with you over it in that case, and so maintaining your identity costs what it already costs you to keep your computer powered on. Unlike the fixed recurring cost of maintaining, say, a personal domain name. There might be use cases that I'm not thinking of. A Nomicle setup might be for apps to generate a hash based on some pre-defined rules and use that as a temporary identifier while they complete some operation that involves communicating with another app somewhere else on the network, and once it's done, that identifier is no longer ever needed and will probably never be used by anything again. This use case would be very unlikely to happen if you had to pay money for reserving that ephemeral identifier. And, like you said, a byproduct of this approach is reducing squatting and allowing the entire system to scale by recycling unmaintained identifiers. In the case of the temporary, disposable ones like I just described, we could have a potential setting in the Nomicle config file set to have the system on your machine purge or reject identities that haven't been updated in X days/months.