Overall I think letting people pick their own pet names & grow their personal popularity is the most important step we can take as an onlining civilization. It's also going to be total chaos, but I think we'd have to keep growing & iterating, via a lot of bad failing. Present the complexity, present the multitude of options, & surface historical data to show who favors & prefers what, over time.
A more practical take, I'd love a domain name system that only promised that, at some time, i was the owner of a certain DNS domain. If I stopped being the owner, I could still continue hosting my site, my identity would be cryptographically well known & certifiable, people would know who to come to (or maybe not, not a hard requirement for this scenario; like HIP they should know me when we talk & i do want to say it's me), even though the link, the "ownership" (renter-ship) of the domain i'd held had expired. This again is another huge host of interesting messy hard problems, and if someone does get my keys, i'm hosed, but i really like how it favors a very strong distributed identity over this pressing incessant badgering need DNS has to enforce consistency & singularness.
Hmm. So something like sending mail to a person at a street address? That is, even if you don't still live there (and even if there is no forwarding address), it's obvious who it is for (which isn't the current occupant).
A more practical take, I'd love a domain name system that only promised that, at some time, i was the owner of a certain DNS domain. If I stopped being the owner, I could still continue hosting my site, my identity would be cryptographically well known & certifiable, people would know who to come to (or maybe not, not a hard requirement for this scenario; like HIP they should know me when we talk & i do want to say it's me), even though the link, the "ownership" (renter-ship) of the domain i'd held had expired. This again is another huge host of interesting messy hard problems, and if someone does get my keys, i'm hosed, but i really like how it favors a very strong distributed identity over this pressing incessant badgering need DNS has to enforce consistency & singularness.