Miner Profiles

[whyrusleeping]

Big Filecoin miners will be fairly serious business ventures. As such, they will likely want a way to advertise information about themselves, such as a website link, gpg key, name, country, or other information about their services.

I think that it makes a lot of sense for this information to be stored directly in the miner actor (or, a cid of the information could be stored in the miner actor). This would allow different filecoin UIs to display some more interesting information about each miner.

We should figure out a base format for this information and suggest miners fill out pieces they care about. Miners can probably add whatever fields they want to, but setting the conventions early will make things easier.

[davidad]

I feel uncomfortable with shipping this functionality as part of Filecoin. By making it an officially supported part of the protocol, we lend credibility to the information being advertised thereby, which could be completely falsified. IMO, information linking crypto-protocol addresses to other forms of identity should be published on entities' HTTPS sites (example: https://www.eff.org/pages/ethereum-and-litecoin-donations) and/or unofficial 3rd-party directories (example: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt).

[whyrusleeping]

@davidad The main issue I have with relying on some out of protocol system for this is that it makes discovery much more difficult, and opens up a vector for centralization. If some random website becomes the de-facto way to learn about filecoin miners, then that website now has a fairly significant amount of control over which miners are more likely to be selected. Putting this 'in protocol' (its an annotation, really) puts everyone on the same level.

Using https as the 'trust mechanism' for identity linking makes sense, and could be fairly easily done via some conventions around some sort of https://doman.tld/minerAddresses type page. Client implementations could know to validate that.

[pooja]

Related to #178

[mishmosh]

Closing - #55 is a more recent take on same need.