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You're right, usernames are not native to Bitcoin like sats. They’re strings of data, and any naming system requires some social agreement.
The real question is how much trust that agreement requires.
Humans have a fundamental need to convert long, hard to remember cryptographic keys into simple, human readable names. Spaces solves this while staying true to Bitcoin’s ethos.
Ownership of a Spaces handle is permanently anchored on Bitcoin via a Merkle proof that any node can independently verify. No company, registrar, or government can revoke it.
Adoption is required for the names to be widely recognized, just as it was for Bitcoin itself. But once adopted, you get verifiable sovereign ownership that DNS can never match.
This is a meaningful step toward sovereign identity on Bitcoin, just like Bitcoin was a meaningful step away from trusting banks.
It's not how lightning works at all. At any point I can exit to the chain and the chain understands bitcoin. If I close my channel, I have the sats in a UTXO.
With your thing I have some data embedded in a block. For the data to have any meaning I have to rely on the existence of people who follow your protocol. Let's say I do your thing right now and I claim ownership of my username via your proof. This doesn't stop anyone from claiming they are Scoresby. At best all it does is show that I had a private key that was somehow associated with claiming this name in the manner prescribed by your protocol.
What I'm trying to point out is that Bitcoin is really only good for one thing: keeping track of where sats are. (well, actually two things: allowing people to move sats around even when others don't want them to and also keeping track of where sats are). It works because sats are native to bitcoin.
Usernames are not native. They are strings of data (which you compress into a merkle proof). It doesn't change the fact that we need some kind agreement on how to interpret the data. That's where your protocol comes in. And that's where the problem is: what if someone else doesn't follow your protocol and claims to be Scoresby? Can I stop them? What if someone who is not me claims the name in Spaces before I do?
I don't see how these problems are solved, and if these problems aren't solved, why not just trust DNS?