[GNU/consensus] Zooko's Triangle

[elijah]

On 07/24/2013 11:01 AM, carlo von lynX wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 10:13:04PM +0200, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>> They are in the church of "your email is your identity" -- let's
>> be clear this is an unnecessary restriction with will not scale. 
>> Other projects (not mentioning any names) *cough cough* are also
>> in this religious sect.
> also, key management is ridiculously easy if it doesn't try to get 
> along with email addresses. the key is the identity. works great in 
> modern systems such as tor hidden services, retroshare etc.

We still live under Zooko's triangle. Identity <> key mapping is only
easy if you exclusively care about globally unique and decentralized,
but it is very hard if you care also about human friendly.

You can get all three, if you cheat. Namecoin is an example of cheating
in a peer to peer way (the cheat is that the global append-only log is
essentially an authority, derived from consensus of miners). DANE
achieves all three by relying on the authority of the root DNS zone.
Nicknym, the protocol we are working on (https://leap.se/en/nicknym)
also achieves all three by relying on DNS, although in an entirely
different way.

We can, and must, do much better than a secure identity system that is
unfriendly to humans. It is the 21st century, after all.

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.

-elijah