Onion websites also don't need TLS (they have their own built-in encryption) so that solves the previous commenter's complaint too. Add in decentralized mesh networking and it might actually be possible to eliminate the dependency on an ISP too.
Proton Mail burned CPU time until they found a public key that started the way they wanted it to.
So that is the public key for an HTTPS equivalent as part of the tor protocol.
You can ALSO get an HTTPS certificate for an onion URL; a few providers offer it. But it’s not necessary for security - it does provide some additional verification (perhaps).
If everyone who wants a human readable domain did this, it would environmentally irresponsible. Then 'typo' domains would be trivial. protonmailrmez31otcciphtkl or protonmailrmez3lotcciphtkl.
Its a shame these did put in a better built-in human readable url system. Maybe a free form text field 15-20 characters long appended to the public key and somehow be made part of that key. Maybe the key contains a checksum of those letters to verify the text field. So something like protonmail.rmez3lotcciphtkl+checksum.
But this being said, I think being a sort of independent 'not needing of third parties' ethic just isnt realistic. Its the libertarian housecat meme writ large. Once you're communicating with others and being part of a shared communal system, you lose that independence. Keeping a personal diary is independent. Anything past that is naturally communal and would involve some level of sharing, cooperation, and dependency on others.
I think this sort of anti-communal attitude is rooted in a lot of regressive stuff and myths of the 'man is an island' and 'great man' nonsense. Then leads to weird stuff like bizarre domain names and services no one likes to use. Outside of very limited use cases, tor just can't compete.
