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Comment by olah_1 | Hacker News Reader

It’s clear to me that human-meaningful is the one to drop.

Status messenger has a nice naming solution. They give everyone a three-random-word name when they join (an Ethereum pub key is under that of course). Then (1) your friends can assign to you their own nickname for you, or (2) you can buy an ENS name that is globally findable.

I think of this basically like car license plates. You can optionally get a vanity plate.

Another project that I love is BrightID. It really embodies the idea that we don’t actually need a global registry of names for most use cases. Most of the time we just want to know if someone is legit or not. A web of independent Rolodexes is enough to determine that.

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Sometimes human-meaningful is the point. You would have us use IP addresses instead of domain names?

More precisely, the semantic buck has to stop somewhere. Let's say I want to visit the offical website of the Smithsonian museum. There needs to be a system I can type "smithsonian" into and reliably find the right page.

> You would have us use IP addresses instead of domain names?

I mean... that's essentially what phone numbers are, and even non-technical people get by surprisingly fine with those.

Surprisingly fine compared to what? I probably only remember my own phone number at this point, people around me maybe 2-3 numbers that they most commonly use. Imagine having to remember everyone's number in order to write to them on whatsapp, I'd forget about 99% of my friends then.

Compared to the number of names I can remember, numbers basically enter and exit my brain while people names and domain names can stay in my head what feels like forever.

Get a desk phone and dial numbers by hand rather than just tapping the name on your cell. In a few weeks you’ll have your most common numbers memorized.

Hah, I deleted a whole extra paragraph of reply about how it "used to be phone books", and before that it was the operator at the local telephone exchange. How exactly would you go about telephoning the Smithsonian, then? You'd remember the number? Or you'd use some centralized facility?

You would ask a friend: "do you know the number of the Smithsonian?"

Or you would visit the Smithsonian in person and ask them.

Once you have the number, you would store it in your personal contacts list, you don't need to remember it.

Friend: "No, of course I don't know the phone number of the Smithsonian by heart, what am I, psychic?"

Visit the Smithsonian? Setting aside the impracticality... how do you look up the address?

No one remembers domain names either for a number of reasons: people use Google (aka, the telephone operator). If tomorrow all hostname were replaced by IP addresses, most people wouldn't even notice.

But... that's the point. Now Google is the operator. You still need the service somewhere in the chain! You can never obsolete the need to map the word "smithsonian" to some number or address - you can only move it around.

> I mean... that's essentially what phone numbers are, and even non-technical people get by surprisingly fine with those.

That's why every person saves every number they ever call in their phone...under a name.

And an ancestor comment said:

>your friends can assign to you their own nickname for you

> There needs to be a system I can type "smithsonian" into and reliably find the right page.

You should look into what Iris is doing with web of trust[1]. To me, this is the future. But like I said, Status has a good mix of multiple solutions that includes ENS names.

[1]: https://www.hackernoon.com/what-is-wrong-with-the-internet-a...

Dropping the "human-meaningful" part fixes the problems with the technology, but it exacerbates the problems with the human behind the keyboard.

A trusted source of accurate information is a prerequisite for entering someone's information into a rolodex. This even a problem with actual rolodexes.

i.e.:

* if data is missing, where do you get it?

* how do you know that data is currently valid?

* can you trust the person giving you the data?

The human-meaningful names help users make important decisions on how they interact with their technology.

> A trusted source of accurate information is a prerequisite for entering someone's information into a rolodex. This even a problem with actual rolodexes.

How do you get someone’s phone number today? You just ask them. I don’t see a problem with this.

If you’re interested in a more clever way to handle public names mapped to keys though, you should look at Iris[1]. Users are verified by web of trust. And information stays up to date because you’re actually connected with them in the web.

[1]: https://github.com/irislib/iris-messenger

> How do you get someone’s phone number today? You just ask them.

There's a lot of subtle assumptions in this. When you ask for someone's phone number, you are already communicating with them in another manner. Much of the trust in this is derived from that other communication channel.

For example, when I walk into a building that says "H&R Block" on the side of it, I know that the time and money spent into establishing a business with a legitimate appearance, is a significant barrier to say, a scammer. I can be somewhat assured that the person inside, if asked, will give me a phone number of someone who is actually capable of doing my taxes.

A situation where trust cannot be assumed is more like a phone number written on the wall of a bathroom stall at a rest stop: "call 555-5555, I'll do your taxes".

I shared Iris in my last comment but perhaps this would have been better to share to explain the idea.

I think what you’re looking for is the solution to indexes. You’re right that indexes are really the big issue here. We were talking about two different use cases but I get you now.

https://www.hackernoon.com/what-is-wrong-with-the-internet-a...

Of course, something ENS domains is another solution (per my original comment up the chain). But that also is price prohibitive and sort of annoying in its own way. The cost upholds current power structures, but many don’t have an issue with that.

Bring back key signing parties? The less fun of the two key parties.

BrightID is... interesting. The idea is to ensure that each physical human has at most one Bright ID account by using social verification, right? I can't figure out from a quick skim of https://brightid.gitbook.io/brightid/getting-started how they prevent you from getting multiple accounts by getting verified through two or more disjoint social groups.

> I can't figure out how they prevent you from getting multiple accounts

I'm not sure about that, to be honest. One thing to keep in mind though is the importance of validating identities in person. I think you get higher trust by scanning each other IRL.

So a whole network of anonymous avatars could "connect", but it would be rare for them to scan each others' devices in person. I would imagine that most people would simply lack the energy to go through the whole process with two different devices. So on-the-whole, the anonymous avatar style network would be less trustworthy algorithmically.

This is probably a question worth asking them https://twitter.com/BrightIDProject

"your friends can assign to you their own nickname for you" is "petnames":

http://skyhunter.com/marcs/petnames/IntroPetNames.html

Quote:

Though no single name can have all three properties, the petname system does indeed embody all three properties.

Yeah it's not a particularly groundbreaking concept. It has existed for as long as people have kept personal address books.

Another implementation is in Secure-Scuttlebutt. But those "petnames" are actually gossiped around by default (which I would argue is not very intuitive for people).

> BrightID

Thanks for sharing, it's really interesting. From what i understand different communities using nicknames could still use this system, though some applications may require that different communities recognize you as the same entity.

> (1) your friends can assign to you their own nickname for you, or (2) you can buy an ENS name that is globally findable.

Yes petnames is a common pattern with crypto-secure naming systems. Tor has been thinking about it for a while, and the GNU Name System (GNS) has basically implemented what you described over a "simple" (compared to Ethereum) DHT, so no need for $$$$. On top of that, GNS should be backwards-compatible with DNS (which it intends to replace), and opens doors to cool stuff like Reclaim:ID which is a decentralized identity/authorization provider. Feel free to checkout GNS presentation from ICANN if that's appealing to you.

I’d love to use GNUnet and those projects. I’ve just not found anything that is usable for normal people yet. Fingers crossed that it comes to fruition at some point! (Or if there is a working app please share it with me)

In the meantime, you may be interested in Iris for a proof of concept that very much works today (though not greatly yet).

https://github.com/irislib/iris-messenger

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