Zooko's triangle explained

Zooko's triangle is a trilemma of three properties that some people consider desirable for names of participants in a network protocol:^[1]

• 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 human-meaningful, secure naming scheme, but is not decentralized as it relies on trusted root-servers; .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 that exhibit all three properties of Zooko's triangle include:

• 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.^[2]
• 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.^[3] These systems remain vulnerable to Sybil attack,^[4] but are secure under Byzantine assumptions.
• Theoretician Curtis Yarvin implemented a decentralized version of IP addresses in Urbit that hash to four-syllable, human-readable names.

Several platforms implement refutations of Zooko's conjecture, including: Twister (which use Swartz' system with a bitcoin-like system), Blockstack (separate blockchain), Namecoin (separate blockchain), LBRY (separate blockchain – content discovery, ownership, and peer-to-peer file-sharing), Monero, OpenAlias,^[5] Ethereum Name Service, and the Handshake Protocol.^[6]

See also

• Petname
• GNU Name System
• CAP theorem

Notes and References

1. Web site: Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn. Names: Decentralized, Secure, Human-Meaningful: Choose Two. https://web.archive.org/web/20011020191610/http://zooko.com/distnames.html. 2001-10-20.
2. [Nick Szabo]
3. Aaron Swartz, Squaring the Triangle: Secure, Decentralized, Human-Readable Names, Aaron Swartz, 6 January 2011
4. Dan Kaminsky, Spelunking the Triangle: Exploring Aaron Swartz’s Take On Zooko’s Triangle, 13 January 2011
5. Web site: OpenAlias . Monero core team . 2014-09-19 . 2015-02-03 . 11 February 2015 . https://web.archive.org/web/20150211014939/http://openalias.org/ . live .
6. Web site: Handshake . Director of The Handshake Project . 2021-07-12 . 2021-09-02 . 25 August 2021 . https://web.archive.org/web/20210825165310/https://handshake.org/ . live .