I never understood how it works exactly, but what is wrong with namecoin? (besides the fact that noone uses it) 2012/3/12 lodewijk andri de la porte <lodewijkadlp@gmail.com>:
Morlock Elloi wrote:
A complex discovery process itself is a great moron filter.
How do we earn the moron's cash? Put kindly the duplication of brand names will create confusion among non-technical users and from that confusion will result a loss of income.
Besides why would I want google.com to lead elsewhere than what I expect it to? Do I want to have to go through a DNS(-ish?) config procedure when I want to show nyan cat at my friends house? What else than a unique name do you want, 20Q? Good luck getting free from "slimy thugs".
Naturally we could don the DNS system and use onion-id style identifiers. Good luck making the usability plea on that one. "Don't worry Google can find it for you"? Not to mention we can already use IPv4/6 addresses without DNS. Why don't you?
The only thing that really fucking frustrates me is the requirement of "."'s in the name. Why not just accept any string as an ID? Why does Google have to register Google.[com|org|net|nl|co.uk|be|sp|hu|etc.]? Why not just "google" or "google"? Tie it right in with the brand-name protection stuff we've got going on. They should've done that from the beginning. You register your company, you get a unique address. Strip the "Inc", "AG", "BV" and stick to the company name. There is some cross-business-type problems, fix them by either appending a ".accounting" or by changing names. Allow people to register addresses but override them if a business comes in the way.
Why didn't they do it? Politics, man.
Seriously though, we should figure out a way of splitting the responsibility for who gets what address. ICANN is now screwing that bigtime by spamming gTLD's. Maybe we'll abandon them completely in the future. I suspect the switch'll be quite painful.