[tor-dev] Future Onion Addresses and Human Factors

[Philipp Winter]

On Sat, Aug 08, 2015 at 11:36:35AM +0000, Alec Muffett wrote:
> 1) it’s all very well to go an mine something like “facebookcorewwwi”
> as an onion address, but 16 characters probably already exceeds human
> ability for easy string comparison.

I wonder if a better way forward is to focus on tools (e.g., a petname
system in Tor Browser) to automate dealing with onion addresses rather
than making them easier to deal with for humans.  Vanity onion
addresses, for example, might have done more harm than good, and should
perhaps be made impractical by incorporating a key derivation function
in their generation.  As a result, maybe we should make it intentionally
*harder* to manage raw onion addresses, just like it's hard to manage
raw barcodes.

Cheers,
Philipp