[mhio]

So one day, the "search" default moves to the most popular and everything breaks? based on the amount of traffic generated for the other "search"?

Do you have more detailed write ups of that or the alternate schemes, at first take that sounds horribly flawed.

[survirtual]

“Everything” wouldn’t break; the most popular address is the one that gets the name. It means businesses and admins would need to put in the work to have a good product instead of getting lucky / having a ton of money to grab a name. Most likely, once a popular name is defaulted it will never change since this system has a “snowball” effect, but if a ground-breaking innovation occurs, then it would have a chance of taking the name.

Anyone that manually sets a name to an address is unaffected by the default setting. Only people that haven’t overridden the default are impacted. Most people would likely not even participate in this mechanism of “voting”, so it would be a smaller group that I assume is more involved that directs defaults.

Nothing is perfect but I think this would have significantly better results for humanity as a whole once it is matured than the current system.

Additional note: For anything programmatic / apis / etc, the address hash can just be utilized to connect systems. The address hash is not an IP address. It is a record set that can only be modified using signed messages, where the latest signed message determines what is in the record — this is where a record for, say, another IP can exist. Or a record to another address hash, etc. This record set could operate basically the same as current records for domains.

[mhio]

The default is kind of like using top result of a search as the owner then? But I guess you want to count the number of real people who "favourite" a name > hash mapping.

You would need a consistent "easy" name as well at some point though, like a bank for example, can't use a name that could one day change for people who haven't bothered to default it.

Another issue might be names for the smaller, but very long tail of the internet, which would be open for abuse. For example a name could come and go with a social media post that gains traction, which would far outweigh the regular traffic for a name.