Unique decentralized identifiers present significant human interface challenges. We begin to address these in our two new research papers exploring petnames, self-proclaimed names, and edge names:
Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
This paper is co-authored with Mark Miller, Zachary Larson, Kate Sills and Eli Yaacoby. In it, we introduce various approaches to petname system design and discuss how we can build a human-friendly yet cryptographically secure approach to naming in distributed applications.
Implementation of a petnames system in an existing chat application
This paper documents our experiences implementing a petname system inside Goblin Chat, a peer-to-peer social application. We cover some common use cases, issues, and needs in existing naming and petnaming systems; then take a walk through the methods we used to build up the features of our own example petname system, as well as results and surprises we met along the way.
Many thanks to NLnet for funding both the implementation of a petnames system in Goblin Chat and for their generous grants supporting our research.