Jeff Lau on Farcaster

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https://ethereum.org

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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. 🧵

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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7/ We still need us as humans to do the job of actually naming things, which means we need everyone that uses web3 to buy in. ENS has a lot of integrations already, but we need deeper integrations like the recent @uniswap uni.eth subdomain integration to name absolutely everything.

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8/ That is why ENS was built as a protocol first and not as a product, because a human-centric product allows the creativity to be taken on by its users and not enforced by design.

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9/ This doesn’t mean ENS doesn’t need to built great products, rather it means we build to enhance all the other products that are already using ENS under the hood. We build the technology around the humans that use it.

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10/ Originally we envisioned ENS as a naming system to name crypto addresses, and to a large extent, we still remain true to that. But as web3 users, the meaning of an address is so much more, it can be your farcaster id, your crypto payment address, a DAO contract and more.

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