> nothing stopping someone from selling their private key to someone else. The fact that the original owner(s) can still use the name would prevent resale. Fo

> nothing stopping someone from selling their private key to someone else. The fact that the original owner(s) can still use the name would prevent resale. For example, the admins could simply shadowban a username if they verify that multiple users have the same key (e.g. if my private key was stolen, I'd report it to the admin). > If you just want to avoid squatting/speculating, you could make the user IDs be random unique values but associate them with a non-unique human-readable name. The literal identifier isn't important to account resale value. User accounts include all of the state as well as the literal identifier, including reputation, longevity, and associated app content. This is all valuable to asshats -- they want high-reputation accounts to broaden their spam audience. But in order to make it costly for asshats to gain high-reputation accounts (more costly for them than for admins to shadowban them), we can't give them any shortcuts -- the system should compel them to spend time and energy to earn their reputation like everyone else. So, account resale shouldn't be supported by the system. > I believe it works by having users meet in person and mutually verify each other as being unique humans. It should be impossible for someone to pretend to be two people in the same place at the same time, so that does seem viable. This does not sound like it prevents a small number of asshats from just creating a bunch of fake sockpuppet accounts. If creating accounts is a cheap (or cheaper) than shadowbanning them, then the asshats will eventually overwhelm the admins.