[HN Gopher] Decentralizing the Internet's Root
___________________________________________________________________
Decentralizing the Internet's Root
Author : carride
Score : 77 points
Date : 2021-09-22 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.ipfs.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.ipfs.io)
| dackdel wrote:
| explained-from-first-principles.com/
| tristor wrote:
| I am sure this is not the objective here, but this article was so
| badly written and inaccurate that it made me lose respect for the
| IPFS project. There are a lot of technical assertions that aren't
| just wrong, they're absurdly false, within this article.
| animanoir wrote:
| Which parts exactly?
| tristor wrote:
| Almost every word in this section for starters:
| https://blog.ipfs.io/decentralizing-the-internet-s-
| root/#an-...
|
| Did you read the article?
| tribler wrote:
| > Imagine if all Twitter users had 'verified' status and you
| could also find them across their other social apps without
| any risk of following fake or wrong accounts by mistake.
|
| Without any risks? Ideas from self-sovereign identity are
| somewhat included in this promo. Does this service include
| hiring notaries to check state-issued IDs to verify
| identities? Risk-free IDs are unsolved I believe.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I was just about to submit an equivalent comment, so I'll
| piggyback on yours. I feel just like you, plus, I also hate to
| see them promoting another crypto scam attempt at taking over a
| piece of global infrastructure to make a quick buck.
|
| I like IPFS as protocol. I didn't mind their work on Filecoin,
| as it made sense in context. But every time I check, they seem
| to be getting more and more in bed with dubious cryptocurrency
| initiatives. At this point I'm no longer willing to advocate
| for IPFS itself.
| tristor wrote:
| It's very disappointing, because I think the IPFS protocol
| has legs, but unfortunately they're promoting what I believe
| amounts to crypto grift here, and they're not even doing a
| good job at that promotion. There might even be a viable use
| case for an alternative root on blockchain, but this
| implementation with pre-mined associated coins and uncapped
| pricing is not it.
| Animats wrote:
| This is yet another NFT thing.
|
| The NFT fad seems to be reaching peak Ponzi.
|
| Axie seems to be the worst. This has become a huge fad in the
| Philippines. It's sort of like Pokemon, except that it costs
| about $1000 to get into the game. For a few months, poor people
| were buying into this and making enough money to quit their job.
| Then the supply of suckers ran out. The token is down 85% from
| peak.
|
| There are now metaverse NFTs with "presales". The promoters don't
| bother creating a virtual world; they just sell "land" in one
| that doesn't exist yet, with vague promises of a future
| implementation. That's almost certainly an illegal public
| offering of an security under US law. (Look up "Howey test").
|
| Even Decentraland, the NFT-based virtual world, only has 275
| people logged in right now.[1] (Compared to about 40,000 for
| Second Life, over a million for Roblox...) People who bought
| "land" in Decentraland for a "virtual store" are not getting much
| traffic.
|
| The SEC shut down most of the ICO scammers. NFTs were invented as
| an end run around securities law. Since each one is different,
| they're not a commodity, so the CFTC lacks jurisdiction. If they
| represent a real world thing, they're a collectable, not a
| security. But most of the newer NFTs represent nothing.
|
| Getting away from uppity domain registrars would help.
| Originally, you owned a domain. Now, registrars take the position
| that you just rent it from them. But NFTs are not the answer. Too
| many scams and scammers.
|
| [1] https://catalyst-monitor.vercel.app/
| jekkos wrote:
| I smell a false analogy fallacy. Axie NFTs are fad so just
| avoid all NFTs at all cost?
|
| I think that the concept of an NFT is quite a useful one, and
| you should maybe not consider the value of it as a first thing.
|
| Domain names were also speculated upon in the early days.
| Remember people buying up 3 or 4 letter dommain just to sell
| them for more money?
|
| It's just a change in the trustmodel behind DNS that is really
| needed here. Instead of trusting a chain of certificate
| authorities you can trust a blockchain's consensus mechanism
| instead.
| knownjorbist wrote:
| > NFTs were invented as an end run around securities law.
|
| Uh, no, NFTs are a standard as defined here:
|
| https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...
| arcade79 wrote:
| Skipping past the telnet bollox pointed out by others, the next
| paragraph is the following gem:
|
| "Browsers started using a centralized resolution system called
| the domain name system (DNS) to make things more user-friendly
| when the internet became more widespread. Instead of typing
| 208.65.153.238 into the address bar, a user could simply type
| "youtube.com," and DNS would do all the work for them"
|
| Given that web browsers appeared in 1989, and DNS appeared
| between 1983 and 1987, we can safely say that DNS came before
| browsers.
|
| Before that, folks kept a 'hosts' file updated.
|
| Truly remarkable how much that page gets wrong. And to think it's
| just a blockchain variant of alt roots. :P You can read more
| about alt roots here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
|
| The Internet Architecture Board spoke out strongly against alter
| roots in May 2000, in RFC 2826:
| https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2826
|
| It's weird how folks forget history.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Not that I think this project will go anywhere its antecedents
| haven't already, but...
|
| > Given that web browsers appeared in 1989, and DNS appeared
| between 1983 and 1987, we can safely say that DNS came before
| browsers.
|
| I mean the telnet thing is really wrong but this really just
| seems like picking on nothing to me. I don't think the intent
| there was literally to say "dns came along and changed how we
| used browsers" but to contextualize the use of names vs. ips in
| terms people in a modern computing context will understand more
| easily.
|
| (That people had other means of managing host names before dns
| is a better criticism, but still kind of misses the point of
| what they're saying)
| tptacek wrote:
| Nah. It's an attempt to cast the discussion about name policy
| as a simple technical concern --- before we landed on this
| weird DNS thing, it suggests, everyone was just typing IP
| addresses into address bars. But of course, there's much more
| to it than that: the names themselves are of immense value,
| and there is a massive commercial and public policy debate
| over how they should be administered. And when you think
| about how central those names are to how the Internet works,
| you're immediately left wondering how the hell some random
| coin should be in the mix.
|
| I don't think it's ignorance motivating that text.
| wrs wrote:
| "The internet was the evolution of telnet, which allowed users to
| connect to bulletin board systems via phone lines. However,
| connecting to those systems required that the user know the
| connection address and port."
|
| What? This is so confused that it's "not even wrong". Did GPT-3
| write this? :)
|
| As for the part that is just wrong, there's never been an
| internet where you had to know the connection address (there were
| periodically updated host files) and you never needed to specify
| the port for telnet (it's a "well known port").
| jareklupinski wrote:
| i think they meant to write 'phone number'
|
| not sure about the port, most of my modem-to-modem
| communication was very low-level (and did not last long :) )
| wrs wrote:
| Telnet is a protocol on the Internet, not a predecessor of
| the Internet. To connect to a BBS using phone lines, you just
| dialed its phone number; this has no relation to the
| Internet. Even if we generously consider a phone number to be
| a "connection address", there's no "port" involved and DNS
| has nothing to do with phone numbers.
| [deleted]
| anonymousisme wrote:
| You're mostly right. I believe DNS has support for VoIP
| "phone numbers." https://www.onsip.com/voip-resources/voip-
| fundamentals/dns-s...
| Thoreandan wrote:
| > As for the part that is just wrong, there's never been an
| internet where you had to know the connection address (there
| were periodically updated host files)
|
| Not necessarily. If your Internet connection was via KA9Q NOS
| over a DOS packet driver running SLFP (the predecessor to
| SLIP), you had to keep your own hosts file, and people would
| trade things like Scott Yannoff's list. If you look at
| http://www.nic.funet.fi/index/gnu/funet/historical-funet-gnu...
| for example, they'd list IP addresses and ports because some
| users didn't have systems connected to DNS.
|
| People aren't talking about Telnet(23/tcp) as a protocol, they
| use that terminology because the command-line unix "telnet"
| client when connecting to a non-Telnet-service (meaning doesn't
| exchange WILL/WONT handshakes etc) on another port, it
| effectively acted like netcat. So if there was a cool game
| listening on 10.123.45.6 port 2000, people would type "telnet
| 10.123.45.6 2000" to connect to the game from many places.
| wrs wrote:
| I never understood why that sort of list wasn't just a hosts
| file. But I wasn't really involved in the SLFP world; maybe
| it didn't support hosts files?
|
| I guess my POV is that before DNS was introduced, the
| Internet had a hosts file you were expected to keep up to
| date, and after DNS, if you didn't have DNS, what you had
| wasn't quite "the Internet".
| soco wrote:
| Am I that old that I actually know what you mean and find it
| funny?
| p2p_astroturf wrote:
| Let me think out loud for a second.
|
| Naming is solved by petname systems - just using a local address
| book that decides what name (if any) will be shown for what
| public key - it costs nothing, it doesnt need a blockchain.
| Unlike all other solutions, it actually _is_ secure. The only
| reason you'd ever arrive at something that is not petnames, after
| learning of the existence of cryptography, is because you are
| overengineering and falling for boogeyman SSL CAs want you to
| believe in. Commerce is not good or healthy in P2P networks, it
| is a last resort. Any time you hear about an economic model,
| incentivizations, etc, you can be 99.99% sure the company has
| designed it this way with money as their first interest, before
| utility. And not only that, but money will be practically their
| only interest. Thousands of P2P products and secure messaging
| have been astroturfed by people (corporations, and startups,
| which have no practical difference) "solving" Snowden's problem
| since the NSA revelations.
|
| Nobody actually uses blockchains. They go on whateverscan.io and
| lookup their transaction there to confirm they were paid.
|
| If you visit a bank and sign up, they should be giving you a
| public key, not a domain name. Not a name in namecoin or whatever
| this article is talking about that you need to download a
| blockchain for and have a computer fast enough to keep up with on
| 24/7. Also, you give them your public key. You shouldn't be
| giving them a TWITTER (seriously wtf, this is like using Steam
| for chatting with your girlfriend), no not your facebook either,
| not even your Google. I should give them a fresh public key I can
| use to authenticate myself.
|
| Any blockchain aside from a small few (like Bitcoin, early
| Bitcoin at least) are essentially a series of logos and nothing
| more. They have not contributed one thing to actual
| decentralization. A good giveaway would be that not a single one
| has a proper CLI aside from Bitcoin. Not even Ethereum does. They
| all want you to use a bloated, intrinsically insecure web browser
| for everything, which cannot even work on more than two pages
| without billions of man hours. Naming is NOT solved by
| blockchains - it is not known whether blockchains will ever be
| trustless. Aside from the trend towards centralization from
| pools, at some point the data moves too fast for an individual to
| run a validating node.
|
| IPFS seem to friends with Cloudflare. I don't what their
| relationship is (the former do truly seem to care about making
| something good, but are just naive on top of ignoring existing
| solutions), but I would not trust anything remotely related to
| Cloudflare ever. They have broke Tor for LITERALLY 10 years
| (~2011-2018, and after 2018 you still need to muck around with
| user agent and other headers) for no reason other than to market
| a snakeoil WAF (yes WAF, this is the WAF doing this shit. The Tor
| blocking was never about DDoS) to their users (aside from the
| possibility of them being NSA'd). If I was in charge of IPFS, I'd
| be writing blog posts explaining to Cloudflare while basic best
| practices for the internet include not blocking IPs for a decade.
| You know? You can't communicate with Cloudflare and keep a
| straight face when proclaiming to be making the decentralized web
| replacement.
|
| IPFS sucks. Multihash, multibase, multiaddr, multiwhatever is a
| TERRIBLE idea.
|
| So what's the alternative to IPFS? Freenet, another thing that
| has no use without webshit, as they forgot to implement a
| document format (which is also needed to implement petnames).
|
| I have no idea why one would be enthusiastic about a tech company
| (not IPFS, the other crap) creating a P2P product, when tech
| companies in America have not produced a single good piece of
| software in 20 years.
|
| > but bro, you are not thinking about my wallet, everything you
| say is bad for business
|
| No shit. I am speaking as someone who wants to have a pseudonym
| and exchange information online without dealing with corpocrap
| and webshit. I don't need my services to send someone to my house
| to make sure it's really me. I want actual real decentralized
| technology. I like exchanging information. I don't give a shit
| about commerece. I like what the internet is actually for:
| Hosting a hacking blog, talking to people far away, sharing code,
| sharing cracks for stupid software that wants me to buy 10 copies
| of the game to have a 2 hour LAN copy, etc (yes, I have made all
| of these). Without laws and other things that only exist to serve
| stupid people. I should be able to code an entire conforming
| implementation myself. This doesn't have to be user friendly.
| There needs to be something that's actually good and secure for
| people who know what they're doing.
|
| Handshake? WTF is this? It's named a verb. That means they have a
| whole actual marketer (or one of those "hackers" that is really
| more into fads and brand names than programming).
| alangibson wrote:
| HNS looks a lot like a protocol designed to make Namebase some
| quick cash. So it's all on the blockchain, but to get a name you
| have to buy it auction with tokens minted by Namebase. They've
| managed to make the costs of a domain uncapped, except the domain
| is also useless because no one but Brave respects their root.
|
| In case you have any doubts that this an NFTified pyramid scheme,
| check out this gem from their "Earn HNS" page:
|
| > For any HNS your friend buys, you get +20% HNS and they get
| +10%
| lifty wrote:
| The tokens were not minted by Namebase. HNS can be mined and
| there was a wide initial distribution, many of them including
| to large OSS project s.
| alangibson wrote:
| Their giveaway didn't go to well. They planned to give away
| "70% of the initial supply" to developers, but...
|
| > To date, around 25 million HNS (1.83% of the initial
| supply, 1.23% of the fully diluted) has been claimed through
| the developer airdrop.
|
| They can't even give HNS away, however...
|
| > The discrepancy between the total possible number of
| airdrop claims and the actual number of airdrop claims can be
| explained by the fact that eligible developers need to have
| their SSH keys from 2019 in order to complete the claim. ...
| Without their old SSH keys, it's impossible for eligible
| developers to claim the airdrop.
|
| they made the extremely hard to claim?
| lifty wrote:
| You're mistaken. Namebase is an independent registar for
| HNS domains and it's not the same as the Handshake project,
| which did the actual distribution of the coins.
|
| I'm surprised people haven't heard about this project, they
| have been linked on HN many times before.
|
| Edit: typo
| alangibson wrote:
| Seems to be a common point of confusion. So much so that
| it's on their FAQ:
|
| https://www.namebase.io/faq/#did-namebase-make-handshake
|
| I'm sure I and many others have heard of it before. It's
| just that there are so many of these 'X but Blockchain'
| ideas that come and go all the time that is just turns
| into a blur.
| mettamage wrote:
| So, silly question perhaps. I genuinely don't know. Is blockchain
| handy for this decentralizing part of DNS or DNS entirely?
|
| Suppose a blockchain network, or networks, knows all the TLD
| server IPs (I don't have DNS sharp in my mind, sorry for that).
|
| You can transfer ownership of a domain to someone else. I think
| conceptually it's an NFT right? Not that it is art, but domains
| aren't fungible I think. So it is non-fungible. So you could wrap
| each non-fungible domain in a token on a network, making it an
| NFT.
|
| I wonder what the actual issues will be. Striving for a
| decentralized DNS with whatever technique one would use seems to
| be a good thing IMO. The internet is for us all.
|
| Edit: Ohhh this article _is_ actually using a blockchain solution
| called namebase. When I was skimming, I saw IPFS so I thought
| somehow IPFS was used instead. That was more subtly interwoven in
| the story than I thought.
| evbots wrote:
| coinbase is to namebase
|
| as bitcoin is to handshake
| miohtama wrote:
| The most popular decentralised domain name system is ENS. While
| domains are not called NFTs (ENS predates the term) it
| functions more or less how you described.
|
| https://ens.domains/
| alfl wrote:
| Not a silly question, I think you've described Namecoin.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Conceptually, there is an important distinction between
| "mechanism" and "policy." There are many, many mechanisms for
| handling legal/technical control/ownership/system of
| record/etc. This is a problem with solutions that date to the
| beginning of civilization. Whether mechanism is pieces of paper
| in a vault or replicated records in different jurisdictions or
| hashes on blockchain matters only on the margins.
|
| Policy is the hard part. What happens when mechanism fails or
| when the parties relying on the mechanism have disagreements
| about the implications. When there is disagreement about which
| blockchain is authoritative. (Sometimes blockchain people call
| this "governance" and wish to solve it also with mechanism.)
|
| Anyway, there are good reasons for human organizations to act
| in a policy/governance capacity. One may think of any
| particular organization as flawed, which is no doubt true. But
| in any context where people depend on the mechanism working
| "correctly" people are the only participants who can provide
| that assurance.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Of course it's not lol, like anything Blockchain it adds no
| value and makes everything it touches worse. If Apple loses
| their domain NFT should they what, just re-brand the business?
|
| There's a reason we have a chain of trust and authority leading
| all the way up to the supreme court and not just "yolo, SFYL."
|
| [edit] Like all the distributed identity plays, "not your keys,
| not your life" is such an asinine model to try and foist on
| people.
| barnabee wrote:
| There are plenty of ways to avoid 1:1 mapping between keys
| and access to/control of things on decentralised networks and
| blockchains, so really these are not arguments against
| blockchain just against a specific way you can choose to
| manage your keys.
|
| Simple multisigs are a good start, as is key recovery via m
| of n (Shamir's secret sharing). More sophisticated systems
| have been built on top of this to allow, for instance, users
| to use their (singular) keys and to also allow a process,
| that remains decentralised, in which multiple [somewhat]
| trusted parties participate to recover access if they lose
| their keys or die.
|
| These solutions are obviously more complex to build and
| interact with than a simple public/private keypair, hence why
| it has taken longer to develop them, audit then, and get to a
| point where they have a decent and intuitive UX (check out
| Argent, Gnosis Safe, among many). But if a big part of your
| argument against blockchain technology in 2021 is about lost
| keys, I'd highly recommend digging deeper into the state of
| the art before getting too stuck to a conclusion.
|
| There was a time "I wouldn't use my credit card on a website
| because it's too insecure" made sense too, but HTTPS became
| the standard and we moved on. So it goes.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I'm well aware of the state of the art lol. But that's not
| a _better_ system in any way. It 's slower, less efficient
| and provides zero incremental value. And a ton of
| complexity and risk.
|
| Is it possible to solve the problem? Maybe? Maybe not? I
| don't know. But so what if we do? In what concrete way is
| this better? It feels like at best we'll be right where we
| started.
|
| It's a solution searching for a problem. A solution to a
| question _nobody_ is asking.
|
| [edit] personally I couldn't care less what database you
| choose to use to store DNS records - but it should probably
| be better than what we have now right?
| mettamage wrote:
| Well, I agree that we put our trust in technology an awful
| lot when we do this. But don't we put this trust into
| technology already?
|
| One obstacle you described seems to be very much alive in the
| blockchain world today which is: what if you lose your key?
| Who can you turn to? Solving this (somehow) might help us to
| a more decentralized internet.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > But don't we put this trust into technology already?
|
| No, that's why we have courts as the ultimate arbiters.
|
| > One obstacle you described seems to be very much alive in
| the blockchain world today which is: what if you lose your
| key? Who can you turn to? Solving this (somehow) might help
| us to a more decentralized internet.
|
| Anything short of "not your keys not your life" is a
| centralization risk and quickly, at the limit, approaches
| exactly what we have right now but less efficient.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| The courts present a large problem though. Most digital
| crimes happen across borders. Courts are pretty much
| useless for ransomware, identity theft, and everything
| else online when the criminals are in an inconvenient
| jurisdiction.
|
| Blockchain if anything shows the failure of our judicial
| system. Most of the cybercrimes are enabled by
| cryptocurrency and our justice system is hopeless to stop
| these payments.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Nah, they can just ban exchanging fiat for crypto and the
| problem goes away. It's a lack of political will, not
| means.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| Who is "they"? What jurisdiction?
| arcticbull wrote:
| The country in which businesses are being targeted.
| Crypto is a payment implement for crime. If the US
| outlaws buying crypto, companies in the US can't pay
| their ransomware bills and so will no longer be targeted.
| dumbfoundded wrote:
| I don't think you can put this genie back in the bottle.
| The US is a corporation cooperative and the banks are
| already in crypto and only raising their holdings.
|
| Even if the US bans it, it just moves the market more
| into the dark. Ransomware will still happen and still
| require crypto payment. The only difference is the hoops
| companies will do to acquire this crypto in a semi-legal
| way (probably by using multinational entities to route
| payments).
| knownjorbist wrote:
| That would be a gift to every other country that doesn't
| follow suit.
| arghnoname wrote:
| I've done published research in cryptocurrencies in its
| earlier days when I was in academia and I was very open-
| minded about it, but ultimately I came to the same
| conclusion: it's difficult to think of much that it does
| better than more straight-forward solutions and easy to think
| of downsides.
|
| As I've gotten older and had to interact with various
| bureaucracies and paperwork, I've only become more convinced
| that lauded cryptocurrency features, such as (purported)
| immutability and decentralization, are a bug, not a feature.
| In my relatively short time on this mortal coil I've probably
| had to contravene some codified system four or five times by
| getting the right person in the loop so some rule,
| regulation, or contractual obligation can be lifted. No
| matter how hard we try, we can't anticipate everything.
| People will die, keys (and other vital paperwork) will be
| lost or destroyed, contracts will have mistakes, fraud will
| be perpetuated, money will be mistakenly transferred to the
| wrong parties, etc. All of these have happened to me and all
| were resolved by a sometimes annoying but ultimately
| effective system set up to handle such cases with some
| backstop authority empowered to fix things.
|
| All of us will eventually get into some hell where we need a
| human to override the computer and just make the sensible
| thing happen. How often is it that we're on a support line
| just trying to get an exception to some stupid corner case
| into which we've gotten ourselves. It's always a relief when
| you can finally plead your case to the higher authority,
| whatever that may be, and get some damn relief. Why aren't
| more people concerned about a world where this isn't
| possible? It's an honest question. It totally baffles me.
| arcticbull wrote:
| The iron law of blockchain is that if you think blockchain
| is a solution to a given problem, you don't know enough
| about the problem.
| knownjorbist wrote:
| My takeaway from Web3 so far has been a mixed bag. On the
| one hand, having a wallet means you already have a
| pseudonymous account with payments for every dApp that has
| ever and will ever exist, and conversely the developers of
| said app reap the benefits of that fact for basically free.
| But this dynamic opens a whole can of worms in terms of
| risk.
| scyclow wrote:
| This is a pretty bad take. If you want a 100% trust less
| system, then sure. Go for it. But you can incorporate
| whatever logic you want into your smart contract. This can
| include giving a specific party the ability to revoke
| ownership.
| schlauerfox wrote:
| This already effectively exists. and has since early bitcoin
| days. https://www.namecoin.org/
| tptacek wrote:
| I am mystified by Handshake. It's not just a "protocol", as I
| understand it, but also a coin. In other words, this project has
| essentially claimed the Internet root as its own, and then
| securitized it, selling in effect shares. But they don't own the
| Internet root; it isn't theirs to securitize. I always ask: if
| they can do this with DNS, can I do it with ARP?
| sneak wrote:
| That's the thing about claiming the root: anyone can try. There
| is no title to the root, of course, as you well know.
|
| You can certainly try to do it with anything you like, Sealand
| included. The real work is getting others to agree or care.
| Handshake has some preliminary support, and more, it seems,
| than any other project in recent memory.
|
| Alternic once tried, as did Namecoin. IIRC there was also an
| alternative PKI root that some hackers tried to get going, but
| no browser ever incorporated into the trust store.
| tptacek wrote:
| Alternic and Namecoin foundered on the same issue. To me,
| this Handshake stuff seems like the Springfield Monorail. It
| makes sense as long as you don't think about it, but as soon
| as you do, you wonder why on Earth anyone would agree to new
| root that gives value to a bunch of pre-mined coins.
|
| Anyone can try! I'm not saying Handshake is, like, illegal.
| But it still seems like... a scam? I'm not sure what the word
| is.
| ajvs wrote:
| They've reserved the top 100k Alexa domains on HNS for the
| original DNS owners. They're actively thwarting ICANN's
| overreach and centralisation of control by redecentralising
| the internet again. But sure, everytime HN sees a
| legitimate use case for a blockchain it's a "scam".
| tptacek wrote:
| Is it a coin-like? Can you speculate on the coin-like?
| Did they pre-mine the coin-like and gift it to themselves
| and people they wanted favor with? If so, do I care that
| they've "reserved the top 100k Alex domains on HNS for
| the original DNS owners"? How nice of them.
| coldpie wrote:
| > sees a legitimate use case for a blockchain
|
| I'm still waiting....
| forty wrote:
| The word is "ponzi scheme" ;)
| Y_Y wrote:
| Well if the thing they want is trust then lets "securitize"
| that. We can bundle up all the world's trust sell little
| trustcoins. Inevitably then whoever had the most coins would
| be the most trustworthy, and hence the source of truth for
| things like domain resolution etc.
| mikeodds wrote:
| You can request it, but you may not get the response you want
| arthurcolle wrote:
| you know those black helicopters the tinfoil crowd talks
| about? They show only if you try to securitize ARPA products
| ;)
| beckman466 wrote:
| what we need is a fully distributed (and thus democratic)
| content-addressable name server resolution system.
|
| that way users can decide for themselves who is @bob or me@me.com
| (as their hashes differ).
|
| the current industry around vanity domains and social media
| handles is toxic. people are being killed for them [1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27900825
|
| an example of a working example is the p2p Secure Scuttlebutt
| (SSB) social network: it can work completely without name servers
| (you can even sync over bluetooth)
| evv wrote:
| How does content-addressing help implement a better name
| server? If the system is fully distributed you're gonna have a
| lot more than one person deciding that they are @bob
| beckman466 wrote:
| so you'd all have to be playing by the same id-generation
| algorithm/rules/'game', which will mean that no two id's can
| be generated (at the same time). if you don't use the same
| id-generation algorithm as your friends (yet you claim you
| did) people would be able to see that by validating your
| chain [1].
|
| in other words: my main critique is that this name server
| system is not as distributed as it could be, for example if
| it was built using the holochain framework.
|
| in a holochain system if two communities get disconnected due
| to a natural disaster, they would still be able to continue
| in two (temporarily) partitioned communities. with blockchain
| this wouldn't be possible.
|
| [1] https://developer.holochain.org/concepts/7_validation/
| duskwuff wrote:
| You meet Bob at a bar. You hit it off with him, and you
| mutually decide to stay in touch.
|
| How do you do that when neither of you has a name you can refer
| to the other as yet?
| wyager wrote:
| How is this different from namecoin?
|
| Namecoin was one of the first Bitcoin spinoffs, and it's arguably
| the only other coherent known use case for "the blockchain"
| besides money.
| ajvs wrote:
| It's decentralising the root zone, not just a single TLD.
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| Nothing stops you from creating others TLD besides .bit. We
| just have to formally agree to use, say `/something/`, for
| storing name records for .something.
| wyager wrote:
| That is not a meaningful technical difference.
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