[Cryptography] A naming and key distribution infrastructure for the Mesh

Phillip Hallam-Baker phill at hallambaker.com
Thu Sep 24 14:01:42 EDT 2020


On Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 4:50 PM Bill Frantz <frantz at pwpconsult.com> wrote:

> On 9/23/20 at 10:18 AM, paul at cypherpunks.ca (Paul Wouters) wrote:
>
> >On Tue, 22 Sep 2020, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> >
> >>So I don't want Alice's address to be alice at example.com. I want her to
> be @Alice.
> >
> >We have millions of alice's who want to be @Alice. It can't work like
> >that. Look at a 12 year old who wants to get a gmail address. The good
> >namespace is already taken and they have to come up with weird stuff
> >that none of their friends can remember anyway.
>
> It sounds like we're getting into Zooko's triangle territory.
> The general solution to this dillema is Pet Names. A pet name
> only has local significance. My address book is full of pet
> names, which resolve to real email addresses, postal addresses,
> and telephone numbers.
>

I do support that capability as well but in the Mesh Contacts catalog. And
that is critical because I want the voice command 'open the garage door' to
be context sensitive and open the door of the garage of the house I am
currently in, not my main home when I am 2000 miles away. But local names
are not usable as universal names. They are only useful in SDSI type
fashion of bob at phb - that is 'PHB's bob'. And I might even end up using
that notation when we get to web of trust type issues.

The problem of multiple people wanting @alice is easy - none of them get it
because it is one of the names I am reserving for example use. And it is in
any case a five letter name so it would be ~$10,000 if it was for sale.

So people are going to have to be @alice_toklas or @alice_liddel or the
like. And those are $0.10 names and for life.

Sure, there will be collisions. But its first come first served and I am
completely OK with that limitation. I would much rather than than the
situation on Facebook where there is the pretense of using real names only
they are not checked and Facebook don't even stop people creating copycat
accounts for scamming people.


The users of Twitter seem to have worked this out without too much adverse
effect. And it is not my problem to provide something that is perfect, all
I am looking to do is to provide something that is better than ICANN and in
particular something where names do not expire and trademark owners do not
have to repurchase their names in an infinitely expanding universe of
namesqatter TLDs selling at $250,000 a time.
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