Fair enough, though people still manage okay with phone numbers.  And a decentralized naming system seems to come at great cost - with namecoin you need the whole blockchain to resolve names without trust.  Strip out a bell and whistle - meaningfulness and transferability of names - and you get a simple, rudimentary (spam killing!) system that scales on any device.  I'll only argue that it seems to be Good Enough for the types of people who might care about decentralized names.  Probably a very small set :)


On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 8:00 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:
Interesting observation, thanks.

I'd think any competent implementation of such an identity scheme would not involve end users directly handling randomized nonsense words, however. I always imagined a sacrifice as being a file that you make with a GUI tool and load into a browser extension.


On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 3:35 PM, Daniel Lidstrom <lidstrom83@gmail.com> wrote:
A couple more thoughts on this:

1) Both c and k can be kept if c is pronounced 'ch', giving ~10.9 bits per phoneme.
2) An extra phoneme (4 encode 43 bits total) gives room to put extra information into the name, e.g. the first 5 bits could be input as the key to a PRP that permutes the last 38 back to a standard encoding of a tx location.  This would give the user 32 random names per sacrifice to choose from, and 38 bits to encode its location in the blockchain, which is enough for pretty large blocks.

Sample 4 phoneme names:
~milmoz-vyrnyx
~mypnoz-fojzas
~sawfex-bovlec
~fidhut-guvgis
~bobfej-jessuk
~furcos-diwhuw
~wokryx-wilrox
~bygbyl-caggos
~vewcyv-jyjsal
~daxsaf-cywkul

They're not that bad IMHO, especially if you get to pick a decent one from a bunch.


On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 3:35 AM, Daniel Lidstrom <lidstrom83@gmail.com> wrote:
The location of a tx in the blockchain can be encoded in n=log2(h)+log2(t) bits, where h is the block height, and t is the number of transactions in the block.  Currently h~250,000 and t~500, so n~27.  A CVC phoneme encodes ~10.7 bits *, so a transaction today can be located in the blockchain with 3 of these, e.g. reb-mizvig.  This is reasonably short, readable and memorable.

The identity protocol Jeff Garzik is working on will link a public key fingerprint to a miner sacrifice transaction.  This tx could in turn be uniquely described with a short name as above.  Associating this name with the public key becomes secure once the tx is sufficiently buried in the blockchain.  In the identity protocol, lightweight clients check the validity of a sacrifice tx by checking that its merkle path is valid.  But this path encodes, via the ordering of the hashes at each level, the location of the transaction in the block, so the lightweight client can verify the sacrifice tx's short name using only the information he already has.

Some more random names:
vec-halhic
wom-vizpyd
guv-zussof
jog-copwug
seg-rizges
jyg-somgod
pax-synjem
zyg-zuxdyj
gid-mutdyj
rel-hyrdaj

Sources of inspiration:
urbit.org
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Identity_protocol_v1

* This is somewhat restricted: I disallowed q for obvious reasons and k because it conflicts with c, and c looks much softer and less like Klingon.  H is allowed for the first consonant, but not the second, and x is allowed for the last one, but not the first one.  Y is a vowel, but not a consonant.  Maybe these weren't quite the right choices.  Paint away!


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