Use of Telehash or some other Kademlia-based Distributed Hash Table algorithm

[gkellogg]

While the credential-based login mechanism below relies on an email provider to be the identity provider, a distributed identity mechanism using Telehash or some other Kademlia-based Distributed Hash Table algorithm could be utilized to allow any identity provider to vouch for any email address. This would result in two advantages over Persona. The first is that a centralized infrastructure for email address to identity provider mapping wouldn't be necessary. The second is that any identity provider could vouch for any email address. The details of this proposal can be found here: A Proposal for Credential-based Login.

[BrendanBenshoof]

Honestly, you are going to need a much more robust DHT system then anything being used in the wild right now. Kademlia assumes that a "sponsor" is proactively re-storing values in the k (normally 4-5 nodes) closest peers to the address (hedging against failure) daily (or more often).

Without that sponsor and churn comparable to Mainline DHT we would see a record "half life" (the period in which there is a 50% chance of record loss) on the order of days.

We would need to build in a backup mechanism into the DHT to increase the half-life without a sponsor. This is possible (I even advocate for it) but this is not currently being done in p2p systems.