HeresTomWithTheWeather

Ashley and Madame X's comments about identity persistence got me to thinking about Bob Wyman's recent post which proposes an enhancement to Zooko's Triangle for naming. The elegance of Zooko's idea that you can only achieve 2 out of the three design goals (uniqueness, memorable, decentralized) has been praised by many in the identity conversation.

A triangle that expresses the tradeoff that one of three must always be sacrificed has been around for a long time in the data compression community:

1. uniqueness ==> quality
2. memorable ==>low bitrate
3. decentralized ==> computational cost (this relation requires more imagination than the first two: scalability)

I remember Jerry Gibson sharing with us the data compression tradeoff model shortly before the Internet boom.