Tentative assertion: We’ll never have a system in which fraud and fakery are impossible. Names in the non-digital world have never been fraud-proof either, after all. However, we can have a system in which:
- There are numerous mechanisms available, at various levels, to combat fraud and fakery;
- The degree of fraud-resistance is proportional to the effort invested through those mechanisms.
That investment should roughly balance between the discoveree and the discoverer, right? (Real question, not rhetorical.) That is, the more effort you put in to making your identity imposter-resistant, the less effort other people have to put in when verifying your identity.
This would match how identity works in practice already. For example, American Express does a lot of things to prove who they are so that you can do less work to verify them when dealing with them. Similarly, I’ve done some up-front work at keybase.io/kfogel so that you can do less work to verify me when you need to. Now, in both of these examples some semi-esoteric knowledge was needed to make the up-front investment. In DSNP, with help from service providers, the mechanisms can be less esoteric – something anyone can do, with help from a good UI, though there will still be complex privacy tradeoffs (since social-graph affirmation inevitably involves privacy tradeoffs).
IMHO we shouldn’t start from the assumption that handles are unique, nor that they’re permanent & unchangeable, nor that a given GUID has only one handle mapping to it at a given time. Note that ditching uniqueness greatly reduces the motivation to do frontrunning (and reduces the land-grab problem similarly).
@wil I actually don’t know what “user sovereignty” means in this context. Can you describe/define it? (For the record, I did look in the glossary.)