Good question, I’m just not satisfied with this answer.

Requiring some form of payment is fine, but I’d like the ‘currency’ to be locked into the network so it doesn’t become something you can trade.

Maybe contribute to the network in exchange for a balance, that you can then exchange for domains after which it’s gone.

Ideally also figure out a way to limit people simply creating many accounts and using that, guess you can require upkeep for all domains, so when you stop contributing they disappear.

How would you accomplish PKI in such a way that would allow people to rotate keys to keep their account secure, but without allowing them to rotate their key into a different person's custody, thus doing a de-facto transaction that would enable someone to integrate the system with an exchange and put a price on account balances?

Also, what kind of consensus mechanism would you use, with the understanding that without a way to transfer/sell balances, Proof of Work degenerates quickly into a 51% attack, and Proof of Stake is infeasible? Or do you have a different idea in mind to decentralize such a system?

I'm asking these questions because knowing what I do about decentralized systems, in the end I can't see any way around a system like this having transferable balances. Either that or you centralize the part of it that keeps track of the network's history, making it basically akin to a big git repository.

> without allowing them to rotate their key into a different person's custody, thus doing a de-facto transaction that would enable someone to integrate the system with an exchange and put a price on account balances?

I don’t think this is possible in the first place. Someone will always be able to go around the system entirely and give someone their entire account. If somone wishes to sell all their names at the same time (or make one account per domain so they can sell it), there’s little to prevent that. I think making it harder is probably more trouble than it is worth for most malicious actors though (especially as they have to work with each individual account to retain the domains).

As to consensus mechanism, I have no idea. I don’t have enough experience with such systems to say one way or another.

> Maybe contribute to the network in exchange for a balance, that you can then exchange for domains after which it’s gone.

You've just described handshake - when you purchase a domain, the coins are burned in exchange for the domain.

Just that one part? Or everything? I’m not quite sure how Handshake is generating balance in the first place, beyond a lot of mentions of coins and exchange tickers.

I know I'm a few days late to this reply, but Handshake is a Proof of Work system like Bitcoin. You generate balances by mining it using a powerful computing device.