People asking questions, lost in confusion
Well, I tell them there's no problem, only solutions
- John Lennon
The other solutions proposed here work at the wrong level. The approach taken by I2P[1] does away with the concept of globally squattable names[2], leaving public keys as the global identifiers and letting individuals define local nicknames or delegate to trusted lists.
PS: I had a chance recently to talk with a "DNSquatter": the doorman at a building I frequent. Poor guy bought tens of thousands of domain names, years ago, with money he had available for investment, and asked me for advice on how to cash out his investment. It seems to me that he's the victim of a chumpatron[3], rather than the scammer himself; although his actions do help keep the scam alive. I advised him to consider the money lost.
[1] https://geti2p.net/en/docs/naming
[2] Even http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko is susceptible to squatting by those who can invest (or rent) computing power.
PS: I had a chance recently to talk with a "DNSquatter": the doorman at a building I frequent. Poor guy bought tens of thousands of domain names, years ago, with money he had available for investment, and asked me for advice on how to cash out his investment. It seems to me that he's the victim of a chumpatron[3], rather than the scammer himself; although his actions do help keep the scam alive. I advised him to consider the money lost.
[3] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=1446