Seriously, why would MaidSafe or anyone else reserve IDs for current (btw. that changes every second) owners on the clearnet? It really doesn´t make sense to me. A large part of current ownership are domains is risk investment/domain squatting. Then you have corporations that claimed their right to own certain domains because they own a trademark.
I remember opposing the idea to sell publicIDs for several reasons
- with close to 0 cost we will see a lot of domain squatting within the first months of the SAFE network. I then expected users to turn towards decentralized DNS and what we currently see as “domains” will be merely cryptic keys. Then of course clear domain names will be irrelevant.
- it´s unlikely to provide sufficient funds
- we don´t know the precise implementation, there are several RFC for that matter as @dyamanaka has pointed out above
However, I believe I have to reconsider 1 and 2:
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I still expect massive domain squatting to take place if the price for registering a publicID is close to 0 or 0. If after few weeks you can´t register more than cryptic keys people may turn towards alternative solutions like pet naming system. However, this doesn´t mean that a ID sale wouldn´t find interested investors. It could even raise the value of clear name IDs.
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I think it was @happybeing who raised concerns whether a sale of publicIDs will gather sufficient funds to support development of MaidSafe for more than a month. The main reason why I supported that argument was that we were talking about prices in the Cent-range. The example of Urbit shows that people were willing to pay 200 USD for a project that is even more experimental (although we might have to consider that scaricity is higher in the case of Urbit).
A possible implementation I see (EDIT: I realised @19eddyjohn75 proposed something very similar in this [long] thread 
- MaidSafe launches a page where users enter their email and a list of publicIDs they intend to purchase
- The event runs in two phases: a public auction and a public sale:
a) whenever a publicID has been entered at least twice, this ID automatically becomes part of the auction. Users who entered the domain are informed 1 weeks ahead. More to the auction later.
b) whenever a publicID has been entered only once, the user will be informed 1 week ahead that the ID is part of the public sale. In the public sale all entered domains are openly visible to everyone and cost a fixed price (i.e.100$/ID).
I think this give MaidSafe a decent revenue to finance and scale up their operation.
Regarding the auction I think that Second Price Sealed Bids are the best way to go. Possible implementations:
- For each ID a Bitcoin address is created. Users send their bids to the address. The highest amount paid from one address after 4 weeks wins the bid. The remaining bids are refunded. This includes, of course, risks for MaidSafe if something goes wrong with the reimbursement. Since we can expect several thousands of addresses, the handling can become complicated and errors may occur.
- An Tullock lottery would certainly prevent the hassle of reimbursement, but can´t be carried out with public BTC addresses.
Certainly there are even better solutions, feel free to add.
In general, @19eddyjohn75, I wonder why you don´t consider making a crowdsale for an ID auctionplatform on the SAFEnetwork? @dirvine stated elsewhere that IDs can be easily transferred, if I remember correctly, so it is definitely possible and certainly a market for buying/selling IDs.