On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 1:39 PM Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@xxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 01:28:40PM -0500,
Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
a message of 228 lines which said:
> OK, so those proposals are obvious nonsense but the notion of using a
> Certificate Transparency type log to issue names for life on a first come
> first served basis is not. Hence my callsign proposal:
To be sure I understand: it looks a lot like Namecoin (which is more
than ten years old) except that it uses an append-only log and not a
blockchain? Am I correct?
The fact something has been tried before is not evidence of its worth. MIT built a social media system for Al Gore's open meeting back in 1994 that anticipated much of what only became widespread with Web 2.0, Facebook, Twitter and such.
Namecoin was probably ahead of its time and as you point out, they did not have a solution for managing the private key.
Ted Nelson's Xanadu preceded the Web by ten years. The main reason the Web succeeded where Xanadu failed was that the Web jettisoned much of the ideological baggage Nelson was fixated on. I suspect the number one reason Namecoin failed was that it had too much blockchain ideology attached.
Namecoin does provide ample prior art to defend the concepts from trolls though.
The big technical difference between my work and blockchain stuff is that I do not use any form of proof of waste, nor do I pretend to be turning lead into gold or creating 'money'.
> The objective here is to give Internet users a name they can use for
> life.
What if they lose the private key? And similar questions, as seen in
the years of experience with Namecoin.
I have a private key infrastructure, that is why I have spent the past three years inventing and implementing Threshold Key Infrastructure. Public Key Infrastructure has failed in practice because it was only focused on managing public keys. Management of the private key was dumped on the user.
If you are using the Mesh, you are managing private keys without having any idea you are managing private keys. It is all completely seamless.
PHB
