[AnthonyMouse]

Right. Even putting aside blockchain-based systems, you can have systems without a dictator because they're based on voting.

Suppose the root is a set of public keys, each with a top level domain. Adding one requires a supermajority of the others to agree. Removing one is impossible; it can sign its own successor and that's it. You now have a federated system with no single chokepoint.

[mindslight]

I'd say blockchain naming and the system you describe are still both centralized. The authorities are distributed, but they're still collectively responsible for deciding on a single coherent root.

Compare with systems that don't revolve around making any coherent global view, like Petnames. In the context of Zooko's triangle - do the human readable name lookup once as part of a manual process, and then persist the relationship as decentralized/secure but not human-readable.

[notriddle]

> because they're based on voting

All voting systems require protection against Sybil attacks. The best methods to protect against Sybil attacks are centralized. The not-best methods use proof of work, which has extreme downsides and only makes Sybil attacks expensive, not impossible.

[AnthonyMouse]

> All voting systems require protection against Sybil attacks.

The voting system is the protection against Sybil attacks. A successful Sybil attack would allow you to add your own TLDs, but if you can't already do that then you can't do a Sybil attack.

The real issue with that kind of system is deciding on the initial group of voters.

[notriddle]

How do the existing group of voters prove to themselves that the to-be-added voter is actually a unique person, and not a sockpuppet? If it’s something like a government ID, then they’ve outsourced the Sybil protection, and not actually gotten rid of it.

[immibis]

What stops me adding 10000000000 fake users and having them all vote for my new TLD?

[guerrilla]

Sybil attacks aren't possible in what was just described though since it requires a vote to create a new voter.