Zooko's triangle is a trilemma of three properties that some people consider desirable for names of participants in a network protocol:

Overview

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn conjectured that no single kind of name can achieve more than two. For example: DNSSec offers a human-meaningful, secure naming scheme, but is not decentralized as it relies on trusted root-servers; .onion addresses and bitcoin addresses are secure and decentralized but not human-meaningful; and I2P uses name translation services which are secure (as they run locally) and provide human-meaningful names – but fail to provide unique entities when used globally in a decentralised network without authorities.

Solutions

Several systems that exhibit all three properties of Zooko's triangle include: Several platforms implement refutations of Zooko's conjecture, including: Twister (which use Swartz' system with a bitcoin-like system), Blockstack (separate blockchain), Namecoin (separate blockchain), LBRY (separate blockchain – content discovery, ownership, and peer-to-peer file-sharing), Monero, OpenAlias, Ethereum Name Service, and the Handshake Protocol.