Hacker News Reader

Comment by thefounder | Hacker News Reader

I think crypto could help with the dns. I don't like the DNS being owned by various corporations

Amazed at the quantity of low-effort posts in this thread. HN used to be more than this. It's hard for me to believe that people are acting in good faith here. I mean, they can't be that low in intelligence, right?

Anyway, there is an obvious application of DNS here. We're talking about a decentralized ledger --e.g., who owns what. A ledger describes who owns what. In the case of DNS, we'd be recording who (public key/address) owns which names.

It's a very sensible application of the technology/networks.

Much like our current system of banking, our current DNS system requires authorities and institutions, and requires us to trust in those institutions (e.g. ICANN).

Want a system which requires no such trust? Put it on a decentralized chain --but understand, there's probably under 3 such chains in existence currently.

> Amazed at the quantity of low-effort posts in this thread. HN used to be more than this. It's hard for me to believe that people are acting in good faith here. I mean, they can't be that low in intelligence, right?

I think HN is one of the few places that actually applies critical thinking when it comes to crypto/web3. It can be a bit jarring if you come from a Reddit echo-chamber.

> Anyway, there is an obvious application of DNS here. We're talking about a decentralized ledger --e.g., who owns what. A ledger describes who owns what. In the case of DNS, we'd be recording who (public key/address) owns which names.

And it all falls apart because the system as described is unable to deal with mistakes nor intentional abuse.

anyone can run their own resolver though. it would be annoying to get people to use your resolver, but that barrier will be there regardless of whether or not you use crypto.

how would crypto help dns?

Make it a 100x slower?

Reads on blockchain is fast enough to power dns infrastructure.

I'm fairly sure current DNS infrastructure doesn't use as much power as a country to achieve usable performance.

But also reading from the blockchain is not fast, and I don't know why you think that.

Blockchains do not necessarily run on proof of work mechanism. Why do you think reads from the blockchain is slow ?

Reads from the blockchain are vastly vastly slower than DNS queries, and even then we have many layers of caching between the root DNS servers and the end user. The important thing is that fundamentally getting usable performance for general users means you are unlikely to ever hit a DNS root server directly. The side effect of that is that any claimed "anti-censorship", etc mechanisms that crypto ostensibly provides immediately disappears - pretty much in line with current restrictions on explicit exchanges accepting transactions involving North Korea, terrorists, etc.

any scientific ground for your claims ?

you keep dns entries on a smart contract.

That doesn't necessarily answer the question of how crypto would help DNS though.

It escapes censorship (i.e DCMA takdowns, gov requests etc). It feels that you actually own something rather than getting a "pre-approval" from various orgs(U.S gov, ICANN, registers, resellers etc)

How? Specifically: say I want to buy foo.com who am I buying that off? if the only restriction is that no one else owns it then there seems to be close to zero cost for anyone just mass creating every domain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com