[sepositus]

I am in the process of co-founding a new protocol which creates a decentralized root of trust using normal plain-text names (i.e. `foo.bar`). One of the goals I hope to obtain is allowing domain-style lookups of private websites hosted on P2P networks. It's lofty, but the dialog used by OP is _very_ close to why I think it's necessary.

[jcgl]

If I understand you right, you’re talking (partly) about a distributed name system. Conceptually, I’m generally skeptical of such things. Maybe you can clarify what I’m missing or why your plan is different.

You generally need to trade off two things:

1. A global namespace 2. Users being able to choose names without contention/disagreement about who owns which name

The only way to cut that knot is for an authority arbitrate access to names. That’s what we have now with the DNS and its registrars.

[Cieric]

I've been interested in doing something similar in the past, but I could really never solve issues like domain squatting and stopping individuals from claiming every name possible. Do you have a place where you keep these plans or have discussions around it? Or even just a place where I could get updates if anything does come of it?

[sepositus]

> I've been interested in doing something similar in the past, but I could really never solve issues like domain squatting and stopping individuals from claiming every name possible

I think that's just a property of a naming system. Without something like a centralized threat of force that can know every person participating in the system - there really is no recourse. The approach we are taking is making it difficult to create a speculative market around names which seems to be the driving force behind squatters.

Happy to discuss it in more detail: [e-mail]

(Note: that's an alias that goes to my email address which I avoid putting in public places for obvious reasons).

[anon291]

Have you considered improving ygddrasil or something similar.

[sepositus]

Yes, the protocol is going to be open and the plan is to submit PRs to various projects when we're at that point. It's not really an "either or" with ygddrasil but more like a "both and."