[jaekwon]

Zooko's triangle: Human-meaningful, Secure, Decentralized.

Tendermint provides BFT security in the likes of Bitcoin proof-of-work, except without the mining. It allows for massively replicated public decentralized databases. (e.g. BFT as opposed to Raft's FT). The Tendermint algorithm guarantees that as long as less than 1/3 are malicious, the blockchain will continue to function very well. And if there ever is a double-spend attack, we can figure out who to blame (and it will necessarily be 1/3 of bonded stakeholders).

The human-readable part is relatively simple. You can easily program a name-resolution system using the Cosmos SDK. Using the KVStore implementation there, you can commit the value of a name in the Merkle tree, and get a Merkle proof all the way up to the block-hash. And the block-hash is signed by 2/3 of the validator-set by voting power.

There's more to it than that, but that's the gist of it. Now we can really, really securely know that a name resolves to a certain IP, and know that it would be extremely expensive to attack this system.

NameCoin almost solved it but you need something like this to keep persistent state and provide Merkle proofs: https://github.com/tendermint/iavl . You can with the simple Bitcoin UTXO Merkle tree, but then you can't provide fast updates or revocation easily.

p.s. anyone know why my parent post is getting downvoted? goes up and down, up and down ;)