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Comment by fsflover | Hacker News Reader

> Several platforms implement refutations of Zooko's conjecture, including: Twister (which use the later Aaron Swartz system with a bitcoin-like system), Blockstack (separate blockchain), Namecoin (separate blockchain),Monero OpenAlias[5] and Ethereum Name Service.

Another implementation is the I2P Address Book, https://geti2p.net/en/faq.

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Yet another is Handshake.[0] Which Zooko himself welcomed to the world.[1]

[0] https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt [1] https://twitter.com/zooko/status/1025211998840086528?s=21

How would git not be a clear refutation of this conjecture?

Sure, commit hashes are very high entropy identifiers, but we can still derive a lot of meaning from what they implicitly represent. Git is also a decentralized protocol. Perhaps the "authority" in these cases is whoever happens to be approving & merging a pull request? Has anyone reversed a SHA256 hash on a reliable basis yet? Does this count as secure & distributed?

Perhaps my argument here is that high entropy and human meaning are not at odds with each other. This seems like a very subjective point on the triangle.

You still need some way to distribute the git commit hashes so it's TOFU and less secure than Bitcoin.

Git doesn’t have pull requests.

Agreed - Pull Request was a bad example to use. You can still effectively achieve the same thing in a decentralized manner (i.e. without GitHub).

I’m not sure you can achieve the same thing without some sort of external name/trust system, which is entirely the point.

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull

That generates an email, which you then have to send via MX records in the domain name system. Which pushes the "human-meaningful" part of the Zooko triangle onto another system. Now we're not having a conversation about git, but a conversation about DNS and email authentication (which has traded off decentralized).

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