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Comment by avernon | Hacker News Reader

First you need to get a metamask wallet. Then you buy some ETH for the wallet. Finally go to ens.domains and register your name.

It is very friendly with IPFS, which is how I host my blog. So I put the IPNS permalink in my ENS name contract (managed on ens.domains). The .link is there because browsers can't resolve ENS names. Cloudflare runs a system that checks Ethereum for the browser and redirects to the correct IPFS name if you add the .link.

I wrote a post on how to set up a blog like this. It is way simpler to use something like Fleek, though.

edit to add link: https://austinvernon.eth.link/blog/ipfsbasics.html

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Thank you so much for this summary! Extremely helpful.

This seems like the same issue namecoin was trying to solve but never got anywhere. Does eth.link look more promising?

austinvernon.com was taken, I had the ENS name, and I was curious about IPFS, so I used it. The system works surprisingly well, mostly thanks to Cloudflare. I've only been using it for a month, though. And its a static site with zero JS or any analytics. I haven't tried to add it to google search console or anything.

Namecoin failed mainly because it was way, way, way too cheap to register names, so everything got squatted in the first few years.

ENS appears to have fixed this; the registration and renewal fees are denominated in USD (but paid in ETH) and cost about the same ($5/yr) as ICANN names.

Unfortunately ENS has the same problem that a lot of "new crypto" does: the rules can be changed at any time by a tiny handful of (mostly) anonymous people who hold the magic multisig keys to update the special contract. There is no developer/user separation, where the users can simply choose not to upgrade. The ever-present threat of this "declined to upgrade" situation is a major check on the developers' power in bitcoin/namecoin-style cryptocurrencies, and it is the central topic of discussion in any hard fork proposal.

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