See also Zooko's Triangle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle There's a long tradition of using t

See also Zooko's Triangle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle There's a long tradition of using this kind of approach in capability systems. If you do it right, you can have globally unique identifiers that are not human readable (probably, some sort of public key which is also routable), and then let humans assign local "petnames" (labels) to them in a way that is actually pretty usable, if everyone is using software designed for it. Problems come when, say, you want to put your web address on a billboard. In an ideal world the billboard would somehow transmit the advertiser's public key to the viewer's device so that the viewer could then look them up, but obviously we don't have any particular tech for doing that. So instead we create this whole complex system by which people can register human-readable identities, which in turn requires a centralized name service (yes, DNS is centralized), certificate authorities (ugh), etc. Similarly, whenever you tell your friend about some third-party entity (another person, company, whatever), you should be giving them the public key of that entity. But that's not really practical. We need some sort of brain implant for this. :)