Title: Currency of Identifiers II
1Currency of Identifiers II
- Today, identity provider saml is always in the
context of a DNS domain name. Registering your
own domain is the only chance you have at
privacy. However, domain name registration itself
is privacy destroying. -
- After seeing a recent bit Coin info graphic, it
made me think of an old blog I wrote a few years
back about an idea for an Internet naming system
based on bit Coin. DNS is surely one of the great
achievements of standards based
inter-operability. The mere mention of a naming
system other than DNS is verboden in Silicon
Valley. But why do we need these silly dotted
hierarchical naming systems. Why cant I just be
mike? -
- Conventional wisdom is that a contextual naming
system is needed for Internet scale. In a flat
namespace, the good names will be immediately
unavailable, and the rest of us will have to get
some lame alternative that might as well be a DNS
component. How many good Twitter IDs are going to
be left after 100 years?
2It always seemed that being a TLD registrar was
just too sweet of a deal. Its a natural monopoly.
Sure with standard registries, we have some
competition but weve accepted that we have not
only have to pay these marginally valuable middle
men, but we waste lots of time getting things
right, and then get lots of spammy offers we
dont care about. But if thats not bad enough,
how sweet it is to be the governor of the
registries. One can only imagine the fringe
benefits for board members of ICANN. And the
announcement a while back that ICANN would
auction new TLDs at market prices provides a new
revenue stream for these technical pontiffs.
Monash University is the first branded TLD. ICANN
accruing the benefit of naming the Internet is
the best we can do? When the architects of the
Internet designed DNS, there was no distributed
transaction technology like bit Coin. DNS was a
fabulous solution. But now that we have a more
efficient alternative, we should use it. My
idea is that an xCoin would represent a
globally resolvable identifier. X marks the spot.
Like a dollar bill, the coin has a serial number.
Unlike a dollar bill, it also has other
attributes or claims. The xCoin rules can allow
for these claims or the coins themselves to be
transferred.
3There is some precedent for using bit Coin for
DNS name Coin. Name coin allows you to (1)
Securely register and transfer arbitrary names
(keys) (2) Attach 1K of data to each name (3)
Trade and transact in Name coins. All of this is
done pseudonymously (data is linked to a randomly
generated addresses) and in a decentralized
manner which is strongly resistant to censorship.
So it seems logical that we can add additional
rules, performing in code the role of ICANN to
govern the registries, to make an operational
naming infrastructure that could supplement
DNS. In fact, with new naming requirements
brought about by the Internet of Things, it could
be really helpful to have an alternate naming
infrastructure that has lower transactions costs
for people. Should consumers register a DNS
domain to control their own namespace? I dont
think this was the original intent of the design.
I think we thought organizations would be
registering DNS names, not people. Article
resource-http//www.blogster.com/thegluuserver/cu
rrency-of-identifiers-ii