Why do we need registrars at all? They don't seem to do a whole lot, but they charge quite a bit for it. The "service" they provide is handed down from a pseudo

Why do we need registrars at all? They don't seem to do a whole lot, but they charge quite a bit for it. The "service" they provide is handed down from a pseudo-government organization. I suppose someone needs to resolve naming conflicts, and charge rent so unused domains eventually go away. I wonder if anyone's made a DNS system where the registry can detect conflicts but doesn't actually know what domains you own. So you pay $10 for some encryption key or something, which happens to correspond to a domain, but nobody including the registrar can tell which domain the key maps to. If you stop paying, the domain stops resolving; but nobody knows who's paying.