I love the fact that we don't have a centralized naming system/issuer for NOSTR -- keeps it free/open/flexible/censorship resistant. We've got NIP-05 which helps with more friendly names, but that ultimately outsources the problem back to DNS and the traditional domain system. This means we still inherit the points of control around ICANN and domain owners.

I think we should have a friendly username system on NOSTR which is not dependent on DNS in any way. To do this well you need to come up with a protocol/agreement for how these get issued. I should be able to show up and say "I'll take 'monkey'", for example, and as long as no one else has claimed it yet I should be able to get it.

The obvious problem is "won't all early users of such a system just name-squat on all the good names". That's usually what would happen, unless we could introduce a cost to acquiring a name. But the cost should not be paid to any centralized provider. So the concept I've been writing about I call "name-bonds". You can use the digital scarcity property of bitcoin to limit how many names someone can issue to themselves based on how much bitcoin they will bond to the name. Tie it to digital scarcity and you can make issuance more fair.

Still trying to get feedback/thinking on the high-level idea. Have you seen anything like this? Do you believe such a system could work?