Eh, it depends though, doesn’t it?
A nip-05 on your company’s domain is presumably “verification” (for lack of a better term) that you do in fact work with the given business. At least in the majority of non-adversarial situations, where you can expect a company’s domain/registrar isn’t compromised.
A paid nip-05 is “verification” that you’re willing/able to spend a few sats, and are therefore much less likely to have come from a bot farm. Proof-of-funds if not perfect proof-of human…
A free nip-05 is, I agree, just a unique username. Coming from legacy social media, it’s going to take time to re-educate on how identification “works”. I expect that will happen in tandem with nostr clients becoming more versatile (and/or perhaps more standardized) in terms of how they display user profiles and handle search.
In the transition from legacy social media to nostr/keypair-based communication protocol, people will want to give their legacy followers a familiar way to find them - so if I “verify” in a Twitter post that you can find me at sexynip05@nostr.love, it provides a unique/reliable way to find me, for users who aren’t familiar with the concept of keypair crypto.
Is it less resilient and censorship-resistant? Of course. And those are important parts of what Nostr is about. Ideally as new users enter, it will pose opportunities for more and more people to learn these concepts and why they matter, such that maybe in 10 years it will be as commonplace as knowing how to attach documents to an email.
I’m curious though, if there’s a significant hole in my thinking here Semi?
