Optional human readable names could be a good system combining convenience with resilience.
Agreed it's a very hard problem. We're in the process of forming a syndicate of like-minded parties who are interested in seeing this come to life because the model itself has no exit plan and is basically anathema to traditional capital funding.
Also, to be clear, names are hashed/salted in the backend with Argon2ID and a rotating salt. So the name index itself isn't enumerable, but it doesn't necessarily guarantee names are private once they are shared publicly. Theoretically you could lookup someone based on their public key without knowing their name - so in that sense it's somewhat close to what you're describing.
Perhaps you could do a name presale, although I’m not sure that would be enough funding. I look forward to hearing more about it.
Anyone interested can reach me directly at hn@sepositus.com (this is a SimpleLogin alias to protect my email from spam).
So without conflating Zooko with all the commentators who followed saying, "but Secure meant ...", lets look at the real definition from Zooko:
1. distributed (in the sense that there is no central authority which can control the namespace, which is the same as saying that the namespace spans trust boundaries), 2. secure (in the sense that name lookups cannot be forced to return incorrect values by an attacker, where the definition of "incorrect" is determined by some universal policy of name ownership), 3. and having human-usable keys.
So the system we are building (I am the architect) Satisfies all 3. I went and added a fourth, which is privacy. I say:
4. Private (Whereby a scan of the name registry does not reveal the human readable names).
I think 4 is a necessary property to mitigate CT log like reconnaissance feeds being used by threat actors to enumerate every registered identity for the purpose of automated attacks.