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Comment by zelly | Hacker News Reader

There isn't. If there are, none of them would be viable for-profit business entities like they're claiming. I can see a nameserver (like DNS) using a blockchain. Or maybe a distributed identity service can use a blockchain. These would have to function as public goods owned by no one; otherwise why not use existing DNS or existing government IDs. This pretty much rules out any mention of "blockchain" in a for-profit company's pitch deck as ever being useful to the world.

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DNS on a blockchain is actually the very first altcoin, before even Litecoin. 2011.

It’s not really usable though; all the “dns on blockchain” means just “well we can store arbitrary data on the blockchain, some are parseable as DNS records maybe, and then I guess we can parse all the chain to get all the records???”

it was as meaningful in 2011 as it is in 2020

A blockchain alone is a horrible data structure for random access lookup. There were so many hacks that had to be done to make Bitcoin work efficiently on BerkeleyDB and LevelDB.

Ethereum lets you do general purpose computing, so there are nameservers that just use a hash table. That's how ENS (.eth) works. But at that point it's not really "DNS as a blockchain"; it's more like ICANN but running on Ethereum miners's computers instead of 8.8.8.8.

You are making an assumption about how blockchains work. Do you think the linked-list like structure of how blocks are added to the chain is how data is stored and retrieved?

For reference: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Core_0.11_(ch_2):_Data_St... https://hackernoon.com/getting-deep-into-ethereum-how-data-i...

I'm aware it is implemented more efficiently. The problem it is trying to solve is orthogonal to what DNS does: search vs. verification.

DNS needs to resolve an name on the order of nanoseconds across a distributed system. It is designed with this in mind. A blockchain is designed with integrity in mind. Wallets can verify transactions on the order of nanoseconds with SPV--also distributed because a client can get the intermediate block headers from any server. Querying data, like for DNS, has constraints different from verifying integrity, like for a ledger.

Sure, you can use a blockchain for storage, but who do you trust to do the lookups? It can't be on chain because it will be far too slow. You'd end up having to trust some entity like Cloudflare to run a DNS-on-blockchain node that stores the ground truth, going full circle back to regular DNS. What's the equivalent of SPV for DNS-on-blockchain where I can do and verify name resolution with limited resources?

In terms of access time, the standard would be O(1) for hashtables which would be my best guess at how to best represent an ip to domain mapping. Reading from on chain data is done locally (if you have your own node) and is near instant, but for wider reach I think DNS over HTTP would be needed or wasm clients that can be run in a browser.

Here is a possible implementation in Ethereum: https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/ethdns-9d56298f...

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