Unique decentralized identifiers present significant human interface challenges. We begin to address these with two research papers exploring petnames, self-proclaimed names, and edge names.
We'd like to thank NLnet for funding both the implementation of a petnames system in Goblin Chat and for their generous grants supporting this research.
Petnames: A humane approach to secure, decentralized naming
This paper is co-authored with Mark Miller, Zachary Larson, Kate Sills and Eli Yaacoby. It is an introduction to petname system design and describes how it can meet the challenges of implementing naming in a distributed application.
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. The paper walks you through the methods used to build up the features of a petname system, as well as results and surprises we met along the way.