(IPFS Dev) Sure!

We divide naming in two parts:

(1) Providing a long-term reliable mutable pointer. (no consensus needed)
(2) Providing a long-term reliable short and human-readable identifier. (consensus needed)

Where "long-term reliable" means i can rely on it for decades for important businesses. I.e. nobody will just take it from me by a fluke of the protocol.

IPNS, the naming system of IPFS, separates these into two steps:

(1) First, it makes a cryptographic name-system (this is based on SFS -- by David Mazieres -- look it up, fantastic system and a prelude to the core design of IPFS, Gnunet, Freenet, Tahoe-LAFS and many other systems). This cryptographic name-system means a "name" is the hash of a public key ("eeew that's ugly"-- yes, hang on). That hash name can be updated only by the holder of a private key (how? via the DHT and other record distribution systems, more on that later). The important part is that it (a) does not require consensus at all, anybody can make names (it's just a key pair!), and (b) it can be updated really fast over DHT, Pub/sub (multicast) and other network distribution systems.

(2) Second, it delegates the human-readable naming to _other, existing_ name authorities (note that _stable global solutions_ to this problem require consensus). We don't want to have to make _our own_ naming authority, lots exist already: DNS, all the DNS alternate universes, and more recently in the cryptocurrency world: Namecoin, Onename, and even Ethereum is making one. So, _instead of adding one_, we just work with all of them, and integrate. You can bind an IPNS name (a public key path, like `/ipns/QmbBHw1Xx9pUpAbrVZUKTPL5Rsph5Q9GQhRvcWVBPFgGtC`) to a name in those authorities _once_, and never have to do it again. For example, with DNS you do this:

1. setup a DNS TXT record like: dnslink=/ipns/QmbBHw1Xx9pUpAbrVZUKTPL5Rsph5Q9GQhRvcWVBPFgGtC
2. continue using QmbBHw1Xx9pUpAbrVZUKTPL5Rsph5Q9GQhRvcWVBPFgGtC as usual.

You'd have something similar with Ethereum, Onename, Namecoin and so on: you just link to the IPNS name once. Now you can use your private key to update that name whenever without paying the cost of going on the consensus network. And So, resolving an IPFS url like:

/ipns/ipfs.io
-> /ipns/QmbBHw1Xx9pUpAbrVZUKTPL5Rsph5Q9GQhRvcWVBPFgGtC
-> /ipfs/QmcQBvKTP8R7p8DgLEtKuoeuz1BBbotGpmofEFBEYBfc97

(Note at time of this writing, /ipns/ipfs.io links directly from `/dns/ipfs.io -> /ipfs/QmcQBvKTP8R7p8DgLEtKuoeuz1BBbotGpmofEFBEYBfc97`, not through IPNS, as this is good enough to run a static website for now, and it makes it more robust as we experiment with lots of IPNS things).

One more thing: resolving names via local-names and paths (i.e. a web of trust, using either SDSI style naming, or SFS's much nicer path version) is entirely possible and averts the requirement of consensus for meaningful human names. This is really useful and cool, and we will experiment with it in the future. But in general, this doesn't (IMO) give you the ability to do "global long-term reliable" names, as "jbenet" might mean something different to different segments of the network, so i couldn't _print_ the words "yeah, just go to `/jbenet/cool-site`" in _paper_, because there would be no global consensus for `/jbenet` and i would like to make sure all my references are viewable by anyone across space and time.

Hope this helps!