Zooko's triangle

Zooko's triangle defines the three desirable traits of a network protocol identifier as Human-meaningful, Decentralized and Secure.

Zooko's triangle is a trilemma of three properties that are generally considered desirable for names of participants in a network protocol:

• Human-meaningful: Meaningful and memorable (low-entropy) names are provided to the users.
• Secure: The amount of damage a malicious entity can inflict on the system should be as low as possible.
• Decentralized: Names correctly resolve to their respective entities without the use of a central authority or service.

Overview

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn conjectured that no single kind of name can achieve more than two. For example: DNSSec offers a decentralized, human-meaningful naming scheme, but is not secure against compromise by the root; .onion addresses and bitcoin addresses are secure and decentralized but not human-meaningful; and I2P uses name translation services which are secure (as they run locally) and provide human-meaningful names - but fail to provide unique entities when used globally in a decentralised network without authorities.

Solutions

Several systems which exhibit all three properties of Zooko's triangle have now been created, including:

• Computer scientist Nick Szabo's paper "Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority" illustrated that all three properties can be achieved up to the limits of Byzantine fault tolerance.
• Activist Aaron Swartz described a naming system based on Bitcoin employing Bitcoin's distributed blockchain as a proof-of-work to establish consensus of domain name ownership. These systems remain vulnerable to Sybil attack, but are secure under Byzantine assumptions.

Several platforms implement refutations of Zooko's conjecture, including: Twister (which use the later Aaron Swartz system with a bitcoin-like system), Blockstack (separate blockchain), Namecoin (separate blockchain), and Monero OpenAlias.

See also

• Petname
• GNU Name System

External links

• Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, Names: Decentralized, Secure, Human-Meaningful: Choose Two – the essay highlighting this difficulty
• Marc Stiegler, An Introduction to Petname Systems – a clear introduction
• Nick Szabo, Secure Property Titles – argues that all three properties can be achieved up to the limits of Byzantine fault tolerance.
• Bob Wyman, The Persistence of Identity: Updating Zooko's Pyramid
• Paul Crowley, Squaring Zooko's Triangle
• Aaron Swartz, Squaring the Triangle using a technique from Bitcoin