petname systems

• #cryptography
• #decentralization
• #distributed
• #technology

A strategy for attaching useful, human-readable names to universally unique identifiers, such that individuals communicating via a decentralized protocol can have guaranteed unique IDs, often via cryptographic means, that are not generated by a single, centralized authority.

According to Zooko's triangle, a name can have no more than two of three properties:

• human meaningful
• globally unique
• decentralized

In a petname system, there are different types of names that are associated with unique IDs:

• petnames: local names that are meaningful to the user storing them
• self-proclaimed names: a public names assigned to IDs when they are used by the ID holder, such that a user can refer to themself by their preferred name
• edge names: names which users use to share IDs with other users, via a directory or friend-of-a-friend graph network

An example of a (partial) petname system is a smartphone address book. The phone number is the universally unique ID (albeit centralized), and the petname is whatever name the user of the phone writes in for that number when adding it.