Contact lists do work and are okay for friends, but businesses also need to publish contact information. What do you put on a sign, on a business card, or in an advertisement? You'd need to print the underlying id number, which makes it part of the UI.

Inevitably, people are going to want something like a 1-800 number, perhaps with a mapping to letters that are easy to remember. Either you can pick the number you want, or people are going to end up re-rolling until they get a "nice" number, and then there's competition for nice numbers just like in other namespaces.

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0perator 7 months ago | parent [-]

QR codes for canonical addressing could solve the publishing problem, with customization of how the QR code appears being a feature for advertising and marketing. Once the canonical address has been accessed once, it could be pet named by the accessing user.

	▲	skybrian 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		Good answer. But I’m wondering how well this works when a QR code resolves to a meaningless string of digits? I suppose most people don’t check URL’s anyway, and for some URL’s the domain name is fairly meaningless. Still, it seems like something is lost, at least for techies, when you can’t see and recognize usernames and domain names? Consider how programming languages work. Who wants meaningless numbers in their import statements or package.json file? Package names seem decentralized enough? Not sure it’s worth throwing out to achieve True Decentralization.