@sun @romin I'll tell you my spitball idea on this that's been kicking around in my head for a couple years:
PoW name systems that you solve a hash first to claim the name (and sign it)
then you can publish this claim somewhere (you do need like a DHT or some other distributed/centralized store)
After that you just have to reclaim the name with PoW a little bit before it expires, establishing a chain. You could also implement transfers from one key to another in a similar manner.
Names claims would obviously expire at some point and you would become free.

The only thing I think you can't get around is there has to be some sort of authority, a blockhain would probably be an okay way to store the authoritative root, without giving the whole system to someone/somebodies. Maybe that would get disgustingly large before too long with all the claims, etc. But you can definitely establish some sort of cryptographic chain of date overlapping, cryptographically signed claim objects to establish the chain of trust.

You could even simply extend this to in-band TLS, by issuing certificates signed by the key that signed the claim, eliminating the need for 3rd party CA's

You could maybe avoid one global authority by baking in some sort of network namespace, where you opt in to whichever group of whitelisted authority nodes, creating lots of smaller networks of names (with therefore less contention).

I am probably smoking crack, but maybe this prompts some ideas for you.