[ryan29]

I think that once you have domains as an identity, you can solve a lot of problems with the idea of 'just add money'. If $1000 gets me a gold check mark, it changes the economics of impersonation. Is it worth it to spend $1000 to get a gold check mark on 'goog1e.com' if a brand monitoring system is going to get that moderated out of existence in a couple of hours?

That's also why domain verification systems need to have continuous re-validation with more frequent re-validation for new identities. For example, if '@goog1e.com' is a new identity, it should be re-validated after 1h, 4h, 8h, 16h (up to a maximum). Additionally, you could let other validated users with aged accounts trigger a re-validation (with shared rate limits for a target domain).

The great thing about domains is that those of us that are good faith participants can build a ton of value on them and that value can be used as a signal for trustworthiness. The hard part is conveying that value to regular users in a way that's simple to understand.

We could also have systems that use some type of collateral attestation. For example, if I donate $1000 to the EFF, maybe I could attribute that donation to my domain 'example.com' and the EFF could attest to the fact that I've spent $1000 in the name of 'example.com'.

You probably have to gate that though some type of authority, but I can imagine a system where domain registrars could do that. I would love to buy reputation from my registrar by donating money to charity.

[immibis]

In the latter case, if you are the EFF, or any other recognized charity (and if you allow a lot of charities that's a lot of people) you can assign a trillion dollars to any domain you like, which is usually cited as a reason to avoid this type of system.

And if the EFF turns bad in the future you can't get a verification badge without supporting bad guys.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

This is always true any time you have more than 1 human involved. People can always become corrupt and dishonest, and no technological solution will solve that.

[verdverm]

> you can solve a lot of problems with the idea of 'just add money'

You also create a lot of problems and break trust, see the recent US election for an example

One-size-fits-all solutions are always inferior to a system that enables multiple solutions to co-exist and which are forced to compete