FaceDeer

One thing that might be nice is if there could be a standard for user IDs that would allow multiple systems to work seamlessly together.

You could have Mastodon continue to focus solely on being a completely open media aggregator and social network, but also have some other completely independent and secure private messaging system that uses the same user ID system. Then if you want to send a private message to someone who's made a Mastodon post you can use that and it "just works."

Creating a universal user ID system that would work across all of this is challenging, of course.

It isn't a problem when you're just running software on your own computer and have no need to communicate with anyone else.

But that's not the case for domain names. It wouldn't work at all if we each had our own private little parallel universe, it defeats the whole purpose of a domain name system. We all need to agree on which names are associated with which IP addresses.

I'm not trying to promote blockchains as a one-size-fits-all universal solution for every problem. That's silly, no technology is a universal solution for every problem. Blockchains are very good at solving a specific subset of problems, and DNS names IMO is one of those. When you need everyone to agree on a particular fact and you don't want to designate some particular authority to be "in charge" of validating that fact then that's exactly what a blockchain is for.

How does your FLOSS software solve the Byzantine Generals problem? If two different people want to use the same domain name, how is it determined who gets it? These are the things that blockchains contribute a solution to.

It's not enough that the software that everything's running on is free/libre. Determining who gets a scarce resource (unique names) is the real difficulty here.

An ENS name is represented by a token that follows the ERC-721 standard. It is literally an NFT.

Full decentralization and censorship resistance. In the case of DNS services there's still an organization of some kind that you're having to trust to not mismanage your registration. Both now in their current form and in any future form the organization may take.

ENS, on the other hand, is just a smart contract running on Ethereum. Its behaviour is programmed, not dependent on any human decision making. To censor it you'd need to block Ethereum as a whole.

I just did. The ENS system, a decentralized replacement for DNS. That's what started this subthread.

I am describing a usage that is explicitly not like that. A usage that has nothing to do with art. The concept of "NFT" is not somehow inextricably tied to spending ridiculous amounts of money on pictures of apes, it's a general technology.

This is a perfect illustration of the problem here. People are lamenting about difficult it is to come up with a truly decentralized method of owning domain names that can't be commandeered by authorities or big business, a system to do exactly that already exists, but it's based on a technology that people have such an extreme prejudice about that they'd rather downvote anyone who tries to explain it and go back to helplessly lamenting.

It was a waste of time and resources for a particular application, yes. But the basic technology is useful for many applications.

Those "bored ape" NFTs were for jpeg images, do you also think that the jpeg algorithm was a colossal waste of time and resources?

There isn't just one single way of coding an NFT, you're talking about an entire class of application here. You can indeed add all sorts of safety features if you want to.

Saying "anyone can mint NFTs" shows a misunderstanding of the specific application we're discussing here. Not just anyone can mint an ENS name, specifically, which is what we're talking about. ENS names are minted by the ENS contract, so they can be guaranteed unique. An ENS name isn't "representing" anything other than the information contained within it, so there are no legal issues whatsoever. If you own the ENS name NFT then that's all that you need to worry about, it has no other effect or implication other than that.

This is what I was talking about when I mentioned the "scarlet letters NFT". People have an enormous prejudice about the technology and leap to incorrect assumptions about its uses based on those prejudices.

There's the completely decentralized ENS name system that would bypass this censorship entirely.

But unfortunately it's got the scarlet letters "NFT" hanging around its neck, and so good luck trying to discuss its actual merits or try to implement support for it anywhere.

One thing that I would consider quite nice about an AI politician is that you can run them through simulations and find out what they would do under various scenarios. Put the AI in a scenario where it's offered a bribe, put it in a scenario where it has to cast a vote on a particular bill, and so forth, and you'll find out exactly what sort of AI it really is.

Of course, consistency will depend on its operators. So there'd need to be some careful oversight.