It's basically just a DNS system (providing friendly names) for GPS coordinates (which, like IP addresses, are numbers and are hard to remember off the top of your head).<p>I think it's kind of dumb that it requires a company to run, though. There are around 170,000 words in the oxford english dictionary. If you take any combination of three random words, you would have a grand total of 170,000 x 170,000 x 170,000 possible permutations, or 4,913,000,000,000,000 possible permutations.<p>If you only took the top 50,000 most commonly used words, then you would have 50,000 x 50,000 x 50,000 = 125,000,000,000,000 possible permutations. That's 125 trillion combinations.<p>Guess how much disk space a word list of 479,000 words takes up? Oh, only 4.5 megabytes. (see: <a href="https://github.com/dwyl/english-words" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dwyl/english-words</a>)<p>It would be extremely easy to build an index of words, number them, then correlate them to GPS coordinates, all with a simple client-side algorithm.<p>There is literally no reason at all why this needs to be a single company in control of this. It could be a completely open source project, maintained by the community. And it wouldn't need servers, because all you would need is a small client-side app that would convert the numbers of your current GPS coordinates to/from the word list combos (which would only be a couple megabytes in size). This could be easily distributed as an android or ios app that would run completely offline.