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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

> I want to support decentralized name systems

This isn't a coherent thought, which illustrates why they fail. A name _system_ is something you have exactly _one_ of, because otherwise they conflict. To support more than one is to give up altogether, it might actually be slightly worse than just not caring at all.

So you'd need to pick one and then, even if clearly better alternatives are subsequently proposed, you _must_ stick by your choice or you destroy the value of choosing at all. That's clearly a bad idea, you're more or less guaranteeing a sub-optimal outcome for yourself.

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I'm not seeing any explanation behind any of your attestations. Are they assumptions?

Saying conflicts are inevitable/unavoidable between name systems seems simplistic: it's a problem to solve. Not necessarily easy, but I know of no hard law making it implicitly insurmountable.

Why does changing name system destroy all value? Sure, changing any system is disruptive and can be relatively destructive; such changes must be weighed against benefits of change, but I see no reason choosing generally better alternatives must destroy all value.

The conflict is intuitively obvious. A name system maps names _to_ something. If system A and system B have the same mapping, that's just the same system under a different name. If they have different mappings they conflict because the mapping will give me different results from system A versus system B. It's that fundamental.

The address bar in Chrome shows both the string as a potential search, and URLs in recent history/tabs with that string. Why wouldn't a Handshake-supporting browser do something similar?

Most alternative domain name systems nest everything under a single TLD – .eth, .onion, etc. In theory, either the standard DNS or a different alternative name system could cause a conflict by using the same TLD themselves. But unsurprisingly, ICANN/IETF are a lot more receptive to "please avoid using this one semi-branded TLD" than "please hand over the entire namespace to us". .onion is already formally reserved by IETF RFC as a "special-use domain name", and hopefully .eth will join it in the future. As for a different alternative name system, conflict over .eth could theoretically happen if Ethereum forks again or if ENS itself is somehow forked, but an independent effort would presumably pick a different name.

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