[Freedombox-discuss] DHTs and Names

[John Walsh]

Hi Everybody,

> 
> I'm not sure someone will have a good answer to this 
> question, as you raise an issue that is for sure not that 
> easy to solve (also called nowadays the Zooko triangle).
In the Zooko triangle, I think the least important property to FBX is human
readable names because a non-human readable name can act as a "Zooko
pseudonym" (my words) in protecting people's privacy. Before Google/search
there was a need for human readable names to try to find anything on the
internet. Nowadays people use meaningless short url's in twitter. IMHO,
mobile numbers are not human readable and I rely on my address book to
interpret who is calling me. My Facebook home page is not human readable.
Human readable names are important to Google for indexing their search
engine, but from a privacy POV FBX isn't interested in helping Google. It
would be great if the "pseudonym" could be short for tweets, but I suspect
this is not possible :(

In the context of identity, the king of identity is an email address
(username at domain.tld). If the username of an email was the "Zooko pseudonym"
then you could have a common identity for the existing DNS and FBX's
distributed naming scheme. My friends in the DNS world could use my email
address, while my friends in the FBX (FBX-2-FBX) could just use the username
(username.onion) of my email address. It would also be cool if browsers used
certificates to log people in because their use seems cross-worlds. If a
website didn't support certificates, it would fallback to using the email
address from the certificates subject field and an automatically generated
subkey for a password. This idea might be grasping at straws, but I would
like to see a common identity across both worlds under the hood of an FBX.

Do you think human readable names are important to FBX?

-- fiftyfour