HeresTomWithTheWeather

If you're a character in Before Sunrise, you've just spent a magically romantic day in Vienna with someone you just met on a train. Instead of exchanging phone numbers, you agree to meet at a rendezvous spot six months from this day. This isn't like meeting someone in town for coffee. This is a test of commitment. This is also a prisoner's dillema. If the other person doesn't show, besides the loss of what could have been, you get to eat an expensive plane ticket.

What does this have to do with i-names?

Phone numbers and email addresses and URLs are unique but they're not as easy to remember as Jesse and Celine. I can imagine a dystopian future where our characters would introduce themselves to each other as =texasjessek and =greencelinefr. Even if they never consciously exchanged information, they could easily hook up again. The penalty outcome has been substantially reduced: If either Jesse or Celine doesn't show up, he or she can be hunted down by the loser of prisoner's dillema game.

Yesterday, Kaliya presented more value propositions for i-names. Her post was thought provoking. For instance, it has allowed me to consider how many people might prefer an i-name. However, for the time being, none of the cases or reasons made me any more enthusiastic about i-names as a whole.

Kaliya included a snippet from Phil Windley's blog. The main point was that if the different types of addresses (blog, voice, rss, etc) his i-name pointed to changed, people could always find his new addresses through his i-name (http://xri.net/=windley) which stays relatively static.

The problem with this is that XRI, as it is similar to DNS, seems to introduce another single point of failure through a limited set of root nodes. That doesn't seem like a good thing.