Handling squatters

[ursuscamp]

The Problem

Any system that attempts to have a unique, global naming system will need to have a policy on squatters, if not a plan of action.

The issue with squatters is that judging when someone is a squatter is a subjective process. There's no "proof of work" for determining whether an individual deserves a name or not. Only people can decide that. Subjectivity and people means trust.

So then a name system must decide how to stop squatters, or even whether to try and stop them at all.

Proposed Solution

I propose we introduce a limited, fully optional secondary trust protocol to handle the squatting issue.

We create a new Nostr event kind, which is a replaceable event that list particular names + pubkeys which are considered spam or squatters. Indexers can choose which lists they consider trustworthy or not. When a list gets updated, any new names on that list are considered "squatted" and the first claim after that squatted claim now becomes the valid owner according to that indexer. It would work like subscribing to ad blocking lists in your browser.

A disadvantage of this system is that it could create a situation where indexers do not agree on some names on the margin. It should be noted that this is not an absolute consensus protocol like Bitcoin. The indexers do not all have to be in agreement about every single name. Even with DNS, DNS servers are not in absolute agreement all the time and the system generally works well. DNS servers eventually reach a consensus, and it's likely even with hotly contested names, a consensus will be reached with Nomen.

A positive aspect of the system is that is it maintains the decentralization of indexers. Individuals can use their own indexer if they like, and trust as many or as few squatter lists as they want.

Conclusion

I think the presence of such a system is more useful than actually using the system itself. The hope is that, since registering a name is costly for a squatter, and ignoring a name is free for an indexer, this will largely discourage squatting.