Ethereum

ENS - Humanising web3

Imagine a world without names. Doesn’t that sound crazy? People and things would be lost and forgotten to the void. We wouldn’t be able to reference things, resolving to long descriptions of people and things. Life would be unlivable.

🧵

Building ENS since forever.

Interested in identity, cryptography, climbing, health.

2/ Naming is an integral part of language and being human. Without names it is impossible to communicate. But no matter how crazy that this sounds, this is exactly how web3 works today.

3/ We pride ourselves on building applications that are here to bring the power back to the individual, but most are still a sprawl of unreadable hexadecimal. Imagine going to the supermarket and buying 0x435…decf (full fat milk 500ml) and 0x235…4efa (Earl Grey tea 24 bags).

6/ The hard part of naming is that it needs to be taken on by everyone, because there is no way for one person to come up with a name for everything. That is why ENS is built the way it is, we don’t name anything web3, but instead give the means to name all of web3.

5/ We allow other social mechanisms to deal with name collisions, but with blockchain operations we don’t have those mechanisms in place, which means we need truly unique identifiers. Which is why we are left with the hexadecimal madness of Ethereum today.

4/ Random identifiers work well for computers, but they’re useless for humans to make a connection to.
Blockchain naming is a much harder problem than naming things in real life, as we tend not to care about name collision.