On 11/01/13 05:49 AM, Sean Lynch wrote: ... > My primary inspiration comes from Zooko's Triangle and the realization > that *all* existing naming schemes used for communication are > centralized. Email addresses and URLs are rooted in the DNS, which is > ultimately controlled by ICANN and the US Government. I want people to > "own" their own names, which means self-assigned and self-certifying > names, i.e. something based on public keys or their hashes. > > Beyond that, like many people on this list, I'm interested in chat, > publishing, and sharing without the need to rely on some corporation to > provide resources other than connectivity (though I have ideas on how to > get around that, even).
I head in the same direction with chat & payments. ... > Contacts would be identified by their (Ed25519) public key. When you add > someone, you just paste their public key and type a "pet name" for them, > which is what would be shown in your contact list. People could also > associate various metadata with their public key in a very similar way > to how they do with PGP keys: with metadata packets signed by themselves > and other people, thus establishing a web of trust that would enable > search, the same way we can reliably search for PGP keys but with an > easier-to-use interface that will always show someone's relationship to > your current trusted contacts. Question 1: would your application allow multiple keys per person? And if so, does this mean the app has to manage a petname across multiple keys, or does the user have to manage multiple petnames across multiple people? Question 2: what happens when a user's PGP key / persona (however it is termed) is lost or compromised? I'm tussling with these issues at the moment. > When you start the application for the first time, it prompts you to > generate a public key or import one (it could be generated from a > password, but this has some problems associated with it). It lets you > put any metadata you want on the key, then connects to the network via > an included list of seed peers, or you could type them in yourself. The > application would then maintain a list of known reachable peers for > future connections. ... To echo James' comments, if you want ordinary users, you shouldn't ever expect them to use keys. Most ordinary users will run screaming on sight of a PGP key. iang _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
