On 25 July 2013 12:05, elijah <[email protected]> wrote: > On 07/25/2013 02:27 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote: > > > Zooko's triangle is not a proof, but rather a suspicion > > of course, but the triangle has stood the test of time remarkably well > as a tool for thinking about the problem of binding identifiers to > cryptographic keys. it is fracking brilliant really, and allows one to > bring clarity to what would otherwise be very muddy conversations. > > > And yes, I proudly belong to the church of identity in the form of > the > > URI commonly referred to as an email address. Not only is user@domain > > fantastically usable, it is also universally understood by every > > internet user on earth. There are other addressing schemes that are > user > > friendly-ish, like twitter @user, or namecoin (although namecoin > > obviously has other problems), but user@domain is here to stay. > > > > > > There's a number of disadvantages with this approach. Firstly, you have > > to convince everybody to subscribe to your world view, which is time > > intensive (also a losing battle from the start) which takes away from > > your, and everyone else's development time. Secondly, it creates > > 'haves' and 'have notes' and balkanized the space. Even though I like > > the technology of LEAP, more so because it is free software, because > > it's done in an intolerant way, it's harder to even fork or reuse the > > code, because of the militant opposition to getting the patches > > upstream, either to the codebase, or the protocol. > > I really am genuinely confused. Am I getting trolled here? The LEAP > approach is: > > (1) downgrade to backward compatible communication protocols when > necessary, but allow for required upgrade to enhanced versions when > available. > > (2) factor out as much of the code as possible into general libraries > that can be used by others > > (3) cooperate as much as humanly possible with anyone and everyone > interested in the same problem space we are > > So, basically, the exact opposite of everything you just wrote. We don't > have a working release for email yet, so we haven't had any submitted > patches, but rest assured they would be welcome. > > I think maybe what you are getting at is that you think using > user@domain as the single identifier for a lot of different things > (email, chat, files, voip, social, etc) is a really bad idea. You don't > have to like it, but user@domain is still the most commonly used > identifier there is. To embrace it is hardly being intolerant, it is > just being practical and backward compatible. >
Embracing email as part of a holistic identity strategy could be practical. But if it's using email as the 'one identity to rule them all' -- it's going to be fractured by nature. > > -elijah >
