Re: [GNU/consensus] [SocialSwarm-D] Zooko's Triangle

[Melvin Carvalho]

On 25 July 2013 12:05, elijah <address@hidden> wrote:

On 07/25/2013 02:27 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:

> Zooko's triangle is not a proof, but rather a suspicion

of course, but the triangle has stood the test of time remarkably well
as a tool for thinking about the problem of binding identifiers to
cryptographic keys. it is fracking brilliant really, and allows one to
bring clarity to what would otherwise be very muddy conversations.

>     And yes, I proudly belong to the church of identity in the form of the
>     URI commonly referred to as an email address. Not only is address@hidden
>     fantastically usable, it is also universally understood by every
>     internet user on earth. There are other addressing schemes that are user
>     friendly-ish, like twitter @user, or namecoin (although namecoin
>     obviously has other problems), but address@hidden is here to stay.
>
>
> There's a number of disadvantages with this approach.  Firstly, you have
> to convince everybody to subscribe to your world view, which is time
> intensive (also a losing battle from the start) which takes away from
> your, and everyone else's development time.  Secondly, it creates
> 'haves' and 'have notes' and balkanized the space.  Even though I like
> the technology of LEAP, more so because it is free software, because
> it's done in an intolerant way, it's harder to even fork or reuse the
> code, because of the militant opposition to getting the patches
> upstream, either to the codebase, or the protocol.

I really am genuinely confused. Am I getting trolled here? The LEAP
approach is:

(1) downgrade to backward compatible communication protocols when
necessary, but allow for required upgrade to enhanced versions when
available.

(2) factor out as much of the code as possible into general libraries
that can be used by others

(3) cooperate as much as humanly possible with anyone and everyone
interested in the same problem space we are

So, basically, the exact opposite of everything you just wrote. We don't
have a working release for email yet, so we haven't had any submitted
patches, but rest assured they would be welcome.

I think maybe what you are getting at is that you think using
address@hidden as the single identifier for a lot of different things
(email, chat, files, voip, social, etc) is a really bad idea. You don't
have to like it, but address@hidden is still the most commonly used
identifier there is. To embrace it is hardly being intolerant, it is
just being practical and backward compatible.

Embracing email as part of a holistic identity strategy could be practical.  But if it's using email as the 'one identity to rule them all' -- it's going to be fractured by nature.

 

-elijah