[OpenID] Identifier persistence (was RE: Don't you think digital identity URIs should have aspecific TLD?)

[James A. Donald]

Drummond Reed wrote:
 > The XRI Syntax specification says that a Persistent
 > Identifier is "An identifier that is permanently
 > assigned to a resource and intended never to be
 > reassigned to another resource." While it may well be
 > the "intention" that such persistent identifiers are
 > never to be reassigned, one must accept that an
 > "identity owner" is, in fact, exposed to some "risk of
 > having their i-name 'taken over'" in the case of
 > unintended events. There is nothing technical which
 > prevents the taking over of XRI persistent
 > identifiers.

To prevent such misuse by technical means, the XRI
persistent identifier, in the case of an indentifier
associated with a person, would need to be something
such as the hash of the public key of a private key held
by that person.

Unfortunately, past efforts to create systems based on
individuals holding private keys have produced systems
that were rather user hostile.

I still favor such a system, and believe if done right
it would be usable, but there is a long history of such
systems being unusable.

The concept of having reassignable identifiers and
persistent identifiers is an example of Zooko's
triangle, however XRI is only a partial and incomplete
implementation of Zooko's triangle