[crotchfire]

I see it exactly the opposite way.

Over time the unitary root of naming has attracted increasing levels of censorship, tracking, abusive seziure, and oppression.

The dream of a worldwide namespace has become a nightmare. Let's wake up.

[Joker_vD]

...and do separate nation-wide namespaces? We have those already, and they're actually the main source of censorship, abusive seizure and oppression.

Also, whether there is one namespace root or many, we all still live in a single world.

[zaphar]

Okay, you named some downsides of the unitary root. Now name the downsides of non-unitary roots.

Otherwise your proposal lacks the context to decide if it's a worthwhile tradeoff or not.

[rendaw]

Momentum, random names and (possibly) higher latency. IIRC IPFS is particularly bad latency-wise but I'm not sure how much of that is name lookup vs file transfer, and that could be implementation specific. Name lookups are also very cacheable.

[nine_k]

I think what's missing is that squatters and other bad actors are going to attack the distributed name system, too. It should be somehow resilient, and ideally resistant, against deliberate misuse by powerful parties. For instance, DoS attacks that pollute the namespace and could make the distributed naming service too slow or resource-intensive will necessarily be mounted.

This is one place where a significant proof of work, along the lines of Namecoin or handshake.org, would make sense. (Another place is password hashing, for example.)

[crotchfire]

> IPFS is particularly bad latency-wise I'm not sure how much of that is name lookup

All of that is due to their mistake of trying to use a sessionful protocol for their DHT.

Bittorrent got this right -- sessionless DHT -- which is why IPFS remains a rounding error compared to bittorrent, and will remain so until they adopt a sessionless DHT.

[anacrolix]

100%. I've been saying this for years.