If there’s an area where a decentralized blockchain has application, it is surely DNS and the rent-seeking certificate infrastructure.
It wasn't designed to replace DNS, but there are an increasing number of people using it for that.
and also - there may be a way for the naming contract to use social recovery for keys.
No matter how you dice it, getting humans to remember 128 bits of entropy is going to be a non-starter. Encoding those 128 bits using words doesn't really solve the problem.
I mean, people can recite poetry far longer, even nonsense poetry ("Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / did gyre and gimble in the wabe") so it's not impossible. But generally speaking, yeah. Nobody wants to navigate to that bit of jabberwocky instead of google.com
It does kind of make me long for the days of the HOSTS file, where anyone might alias a hard-to-remember address as something locally meaningful.
http://web.archive.org/web/20210118172102/https://squaretria...
You need some kind of "admin access" for the system that can fix things like lost keys, at which point you might as well stick with DNS.
aaronsw proposed that you could expire unrenewed names after 12 months
i forget what solution namecoin and ens use
(Sorry for the delayed reply, my account is heavily rate limited, so I don’t get to post more than 5 times per hour and less when someone with high karma like downvotes a post and leaves a comment.)
If that is what you've encountered, you can bypass the delay by clicking the timestamp of the comment you want to reply to. This opens the comment in its own page with a reply box.
Hmm. At some point, a user agent would need to disambiguate between competing identical names somehow (at least for the sort of names that identify global internet resources). Are you assuming the existence of a web-of-trust of some sort as an arbiter?
Apps on blockchains already play the role of that centralized structure. The most successful I'm aware of is ENS on Ethereum. Whatever economic model you prefer can be implemented this way.
This is already the case with the current dns, since paying $10 per year is pretty much nothing to any middle class investor, so they do in fact "own" it forever for "free", relatively speaking.
The early adopters got the first twitter names, instagram names, etc for free forever. People invested time signing up when you never thought of it and they get rewarded.. the platform gets the early adopters. We don't force users to pay and let other take the name and continue to be that person.
Domains should be the same. When a domain expires someone can buy it and pretend they are the original owners.
If they were free you could buy coolformatbestnamecoolformat still get the name you wanted and use a prefix postfix custom format to identify with a group. rubycooldomainruby reactcooldomainreact
Handshake reserved the top 100,000 Alexa domains and allowed all trademark name holders to claim theirs.
Not to mention the ten million in FOSS grants for developers to build tooling
Sadly the ideologues will somehow decry their attempts for an alternative while defending the indefensible ICAAN.
By your logic the evolution of the internet would forever stagnate because developers would be stuck reserving an infinite amount of tlds that keep on popping up, it's just unrealistic and not pragmatic. reserving 100k of the most popular domains is a good faith effort and a pragmatic solution.
And if you want to talk about fairness let's first start talking about the corruption of ICANN[0][1][2] before criticizing emerging solutions.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-int...
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/09/website-domain-more...
[2] https://circleid.com/posts/20210413-insult-and-injury-of-us-...
My question to you is: if I donate MAC addresses to FOSS projects, can I tokenize ARP? I promise to be nice about it. The first 10,000 IP addresses can have their ARPCoin for free.
Seriously, this FOSS donation thing with Handshake: it's like selling people the Brooklyn Bridge, but promising generous new bike lanes. See, the FOSS stuff? It wasn't the problem with the plan.
There’s no difference between a blockchain and a cryptographically secure write ahead log, indeed that is how blockchains are defined. Perhaps you assumed that I meant cryptocurrency when I said blockchain? I did not.
(Sorry for the delayed reply.)
When we talk about the WebPKI being coercively annoying, what we're really talking about are the roots of trust that the browsers have chosen to trust. No browser requires OV/EV.
I prefer the current registrar setup over anarchist blockchain hellscapes. You can sue Verisign, you can't sue 0xEf1c6E67703c7BD7107eed8303Fbe6EC2554BF6B.
Some TLDs have provisions against domain squatters and in case of copyright disputes, you can sue the squatters (or request ICANN to release the domain if that isn't possible for some reason). If you have a good reason to demand a domain currently unused, there are ways to get it.
With crypto-TLDs, nike.com and microsoft.com would be registered by a malicious player without any kind of recourse. The lack of enforceability makes the entire system pretty useless the moment it takes off.
The auction system is actually fairer since it gives enough time for every party to bid the highest amount according to their interest instead of relying on sniping services like in the current legacy systems.
> whereas a cryptographic system can do all that offline inside the data centers of the cryptosquatter.
what does this even mean?
>Some TLDs have provisions against domain squatters and in case of copyright disputes, you can sue the squatters
Sure, but this is also a double edged sword, since it also opens up abuse i.e. reverse domain hijacking which is a real and common problem. Just this week Charles Schwab tried to rob the legitimate owner of a domain that contained "Schwab", while they tried to hide the fact that the owner's name is also Schwab. [0]
>With crypto-TLDs, nike.com and microsoft.com would be registered by a malicious player
That's why good builders put in the time and effort to reserve these names from the start.
>The lack of enforceability makes the entire system pretty useless the moment it takes off.
Sovereignty has its price. No system is perfect, everything has its trade-offs, but I see a lot of people highlighting the best properties of the legacy system while ignoring the best properties of the new systems. The comparisons should be fair and compare the full range of positives and negatives instead of picking and comparing in a bad faith manner.
[0] https://domainnamewire.com/2023/01/24/charles-schwab-tries-t...
The on-chain contract could be written such that a buyer generates a token, supplied to an on-chain verification oracle that checks token.owned-domain.TLD exists, and if it does grants issuance of the new on-chain version.
This essentially allows for a fair transition from the old system to the new system, while eliminating squatting.
This system just seems to be traditional DNS with extra steps and a lack of manual recourse against bad actors, to be honest.
I suppose it could be configurable at purchase to allow it to be a recurring verification, if that was desired, but it would seem to overcomplicate for no reason. "Subscribing" to domains each year is legacy inefficiency.
I'm not sure what you mean about DNS, any chain-based system would be... chain-based, and therefore cryptographically-assured that a domain points where the owner chooses. "Not your keys, not your domain" applies.
Though ENS doesn't implement this, it'd be possible to add paid arbitration by humans for resolving trademark disputes. You couldn't get damages but you could get the domain.
I was recently quoted $250,000 to buy a .com that is not being used and as far as I can tell has never been used but some guy bought in the 90s when I was a young child. Aside from the level of extreme is that really different from "You could then probably buy readable domains for exorbitant amounts of cryptocoins."
You touch on what I think the core issue is with domains when you talk about suing Verisign. In some very limited cases, it's possible through litigation to get a domain you feel like you should have. But therein lies the crux of the whole issue: What standard needs to be met before you qualify for a domain name, especially one that is in contention?
In cryptocurrency, the criteria to receive the currency was originally solving problems with computing power because they needed some arbitrary measure. In the world of domain names, it's been a lot of different things but mostly just money and time.
That standard - what "qualifies" you to own a domain over someone else I think would have to be decided before truly effective regulation can be made or enforced, blockchain or not. Right now it's basically temporal, with some carveouts from lawsuits for trademarks.
The current regulations around how domain names work is woefully inadequate (like most regulation around technology) and gives outsized power to private entities. This is something that I think people don't talk about enough when they criticize blockchains.
If there was a better job being done with public policy, you'd likely have less people who think a system where there's no way of imposing real regulation is desirable.
It's especially bad with technology. My go to example is Apple's App Store, but this area is a good topic too.
To me, a happy mix of public/private policy would be best. The government allowing private TLDs, but regulating them. An anti squatting law, price capping new TLD name registrations, an enshrined "specificity system" to claiming an unused (or even used) domain would make the situation so much better, but it'll never happen.
There's Handshake, ENS, and UnstoppableDomains.
Brave supports .eth domains out-of-the-box, hopefully Handshake soon.
For Handshake you can use a local resolver that reads the blockchain or use NextDNS.
NFTs aren't just for art, y'know. They have real [digital] world use cases for ownership, like DNS.
And Brave and NextDNS aren't popular enough for your threshold?
Handshake is exactly what would stop the issue happening in TFA, yet everyone ignores it here.
For something to go mainstream, you have to talk about it...
HN is not a very good tech site if you only talk about the tech that the common person already knows about.
The projects mentioned in this thread aren't the first to offer an expanded DNS solution for one reason or another. None of them gained traction.
Hence why Twitter still has no viable competitor or replacement, especially when the money is still there despite all the hype and mania of it 'dying'.