A completely decentralized and human-friendly approach to unique identification has been proposed, studied, published with open access, reviewed, commented on, revised, and republished in RFC 4151, Tim Kindberg and Sandro Hawke

The essence of their approach is to combine existing human-centric ids with human-readable dates. IDs like email addresses and web site URLs are mostly easy to use, but they are no longer unique when people move, organizations change, and so on. Dated IDs overcome this problem of natural change without creating a central authority or bizarre long numbers.