namecoin-proposals/ifa-0004.md

Identities — Groups

IFA Proposal No. 4
Title: Identities — Groups
Status: Draft
Type: Standards Track
Created: 2014-03-10

This document is licensed under CC-BY SA 4.0.

This document was authored by Dan Roberts.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Extensible Alternate Encoding for tls Items
• Dehydrated tls Items
• Design Goals
• Changes to Processing Rules
• Changes to Domain Name Owner Recommendations
• Changelog

Introduction

This is a quick draft of a proposal for groups in namecoin, to serve as a base for discussion. This page is not attempting at all to represent a finished proposal.

I propose a json key called "members" which is an array of id names. For instance "members": ["id/domob", "id/khalahan", ...] This could be a part of the id/ namespace specification, so id/namecoin_dev would have the above group entry, in addition to normal id/ information. Alternatively a new namespace, say g/ could be created to house this information.

Pros of using id/

• Compatibility with nameid
• • This could allow shared accounts on some sites
• Capacity to create complicated trees of organization

Cons of using id/

• No real way to prevent cyclic references, this may cause grief for software using id/ that wishes to support groups
• • This isn't a dealbreaker, allowing org trees at all will open the door to this.
• Shared accounts may be dangerous if a member's id/ entry expires