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The whole decentralize everything! movement seems to overlook DNS. I get that technically the DNS system is decentralized, but in reality, you lease a domain fr

by pmlnr 7y ago

The whole decentralize everything! movement seems to overlook DNS. I get that technically the DNS system is decentralized, but in reality, you lease a domain from a random, usually politically charged entity, who can do anything with it, if they wish. We need a real DNS system, one where an individual can request and have a domain for life and which is truly decentralized. Unfortunately none of the attempts - .onion with tor, .bit with namecoin, etc - seem to be working. .onion is despised because tor and impossible to memorize them; .bit never gained any traction and namecoin, being a bitcoin clone, has it's own issues. Anyone knows of any working approach?

rasengan 7y ago
Handshake [1] does this exactly. [1] https://www.handshake.org https://www.handshake.org
- pmlnr 7y ago
  I read buzzwords - proof-of-work, coins. Also seems to be venture funding based. What's the catch?
- ailideex 7y ago
  How is this better than namecoin and how will it not end in same problem? Also this really does not do what the person you responded to asked for - I can't get some personal domain name for life from this - it is market based AFAICT. Really seems to solve almost none of the problems and goes directly for what ICANN only now does with .org as no domain will have any price cap with handshake.
  - xur17 7y ago
    > I can't get some personal domain name for life from this - it is market based AFAICT. The yearly renewal fee is fixed, and is a standard transaction fee, not market based [0]. [0] https://handshake.org/faq https://handshake.org/faq
    - ailideex 7y ago
      Claim from the site you linked to is not the same as your claim: > Renewals for names are annual and cost a standard network fee. Miners will receive the transaction fee as part of their block reward. This could mean: - Fixed USD fee (it is not this one) - Fixed coin fee (don't think it is this one either) - but coin price is marked based - so fee is market based - Price does not depend on domain name but miners basically decide the fee like it is with other cryptos (think it is this one) - still market based - and actually could be gamed to make it higher for some domain names So ...
      - CameronNemo 7y ago
        Can you explain how the miners can price discriminate against certain domains? Seems like the network fee would need to be identical for every concurrent transaction.
        ailideex 7y ago
        I don't know exact details, but if it works like bitcoin miners can refuse to put renewals in blocks if the fees is not high enough.
        xur17 7y ago
        In which case you can just wait until there are less transactions waiting to be confirmed, driving the price up (it's a renewal, so you have plenty of time to complete it).
        remram 7y ago
        You can't wait to renew, or someone who's willing to pay the price will steal your domain.
        xur17 7y ago
        I'm pretty sure you have a time period during which you can renew the domain.
  - rasengan 7y ago
    Namecoin is a great project. One of the issues however is that it introduced a .bit which essentially meant it was a new system/tld. Furthermore, the existing stakeholders in the naming system (domain owners) did not have an easy way to join the system without risk of losing their name or being sold their own name at a high price. Handshake mitigates this by replacing the root zone entirely and, in addition, allowing existing stakeholders (.com, etc) to continue to own their existing assets.
ailideex 7y ago
> We need a real DNS system, one where an individual can request and have a domain for life and which is truly decentralized. I very much want this also - but this cannot be solved in the same way as the challenge of business domain name assignment - a different approach should be used: [idx].[yyyyddmm].[given_names].[family_name].id e.g. 023.19830210.john_smith_3rd.doe.id given_names can have some standard seperator And then if there are two people with same given names with same family name they get different indexes. And this will get everyone riled up because this means you will need a worldwide consistent database of people and you will only be able to get this if you give very good proof of ID and then this because your world ID number basically.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Unless someone goes out their way to choose their own 'branded' name perhaps they could just receive a unique hash of their name for a domain? Tools can always be built to handle these names so you're not memorising such lengthy domains.
  - pmlnr 7y ago
    But then .onion - or at least the way it's done - is already there.
  - ailideex 7y ago
    How do you decide which person get which name? This just gets you back to the whole ICANN problem. I can remember a couple of digits which makes my name unique. I cannot remember 1e873645-1f68-4b48-9eae-934ec717229b
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      That's just a technical problem that new infrastructure can solve by abstracting away the name. Instead of visiting 1e873645-1f68-4b48-9eae-934ec717229b.com/foo, you're just visiting "bar/foo", where 'bar' is their name. Click on the URL and the full hashed version is revealed for proper sharing. In the same way that nobody memorised Facebook's UUID of a person, they can just remember their name.
toast0 7y ago
> one where an individual can request and have a domain for life Annual payment is proof that you're still alive. AlterNIC tried settint up alternate tlds years ago, and is now gone. The problems are an alternate root is very unlikely to get consensus, and name resolution without consensus isn't very useful; and you're not going to be able to have friendly names without an arbiter to decide who gets pmlnr.example.
- danShumway 7y ago
  > Annual payment is proof that you're still alive. I don't want my domains sold after I die, and I don't want my bookmarks to stop working after someone else dies. The only parts of a website that I want tied to someone's lifespan is: - whether or not the site is updated, and - how the site is hosted If I could snap my fingers and magically figure out a way to make the site's hosting outlive the person, I'd do that as well. For me, extend GP's original statement to read > one where an individual can request a domain and have it removed from the market permanently.
  - horsawlarway 7y ago
    Your vision sounds pretty terrible. At a very cursory glance it seems fine - I don't want my information web to degrade. Once you dig even a little bit into this, though... you get a quagmire of old and useless information. Outdated sites never go away. They just become a constant burden on the whole system. Information that's been refuted and invalidated years back is still alive and kicking because a domain exists and can be indexed, and there's no chance to ever update it, since the owner is long since dead. The longer this lasts, the more and more noise to information you get. It's like having an incredible information web and then giving it dementia.
    - enobrev 7y ago
      I think it would be absolutely incredible to peruse old blogs and websites from a century ago. Clippings from 75 year old newspapers or letters are interesting for plenty of reasons. The cost of things; The news of the day; The writing style. Imagine direct access to this sort of content from 750 years ago!
thinkmassive 7y ago
Another approach worth keeping an eye on is the Ethereum Name Service (ENS): https://ens.domains https://ens.domains Personally I find tor to be most usable out of the approaches you listed, but obviously not for memorable names.
marknadal 7y ago
Simple, don't have reserved names! Nobody owns our language. Martti Malmi, Satoshi's first Bitcoin contributor, solved this several years ago: https://github.com/irislib/iris/blob/master/README.md#identity-verifications https://github.com/irislib/iris/blob/master/README.md#identi...
nixpulvis 7y ago
Remember, there only 2 real hard problems in computer science. Cache invalidation and naming things. P.S. I'll add, that on the issue of a personal identifier, we need to remember that not everyone wants a public address. In fact most people keep this kind of information quite private. A virtual address is no different, unless we explicitly make two kinds.
woah 7y ago
DNS is probably one of the most popular subjects of the decentralize everything movement. Not that any of the solutions have really caught on though.
thinkmassive 7y ago
Another project to keep an eye on is OpenAlias https://openalias.org/ https://openalias.org/

by pmlnr 7y ago

rasengan 7y ago

Handshake [1] does this exactly. [1] https://www.handshake.org https://www.handshake.org

pmlnr 7y ago
I read buzzwords - proof-of-work, coins. Also seems to be venture funding based. What's the catch?
ailideex 7y ago
How is this better than namecoin and how will it not end in same problem? Also this really does not do what the person you responded to asked for - I can't get some personal domain name for life from this - it is market based AFAICT. Really seems to solve almost none of the problems and goes directly for what ICANN only now does with .org as no domain will have any price cap with handshake.
- xur17 7y ago
  > I can't get some personal domain name for life from this - it is market based AFAICT. The yearly renewal fee is fixed, and is a standard transaction fee, not market based [0]. [0] https://handshake.org/faq https://handshake.org/faq
  - ailideex 7y ago
    Claim from the site you linked to is not the same as your claim: > Renewals for names are annual and cost a standard network fee. Miners will receive the transaction fee as part of their block reward. This could mean: - Fixed USD fee (it is not this one) - Fixed coin fee (don't think it is this one either) - but coin price is marked based - so fee is market based - Price does not depend on domain name but miners basically decide the fee like it is with other cryptos (think it is this one) - still market based - and actually could be gamed to make it higher for some domain names So ...
    - CameronNemo 7y ago
      Can you explain how the miners can price discriminate against certain domains? Seems like the network fee would need to be identical for every concurrent transaction.
      - ailideex 7y ago
        I don't know exact details, but if it works like bitcoin miners can refuse to put renewals in blocks if the fees is not high enough.
        xur17 7y ago
        In which case you can just wait until there are less transactions waiting to be confirmed, driving the price up (it's a renewal, so you have plenty of time to complete it).
        remram 7y ago
        You can't wait to renew, or someone who's willing to pay the price will steal your domain.
        xur17 7y ago
        I'm pretty sure you have a time period during which you can renew the domain.
- rasengan 7y ago
  Namecoin is a great project. One of the issues however is that it introduced a .bit which essentially meant it was a new system/tld. Furthermore, the existing stakeholders in the naming system (domain owners) did not have an easy way to join the system without risk of losing their name or being sold their own name at a high price. Handshake mitigates this by replacing the root zone entirely and, in addition, allowing existing stakeholders (.com, etc) to continue to own their existing assets.

ailideex 7y ago

> We need a real DNS system, one where an individual can request and have a domain for life and which is truly decentralized. I very much want this also - but this cannot be solved in the same way as the challenge of business domain name assignment - a different approach should be used: [idx].[yyyyddmm].[given_names].[family_name].id e.g. 023.19830210.john_smith_3rd.doe.id given_names can have some standard seperator And then if there are two people with same given names with same family name they get different indexes. And this will get everyone riled up because this means you will need a worldwide consistent database of people and you will only be able to get this if you give very good proof of ID and then this because your world ID number basically.

cameronbrown 7y ago
Unless someone goes out their way to choose their own 'branded' name perhaps they could just receive a unique hash of their name for a domain? Tools can always be built to handle these names so you're not memorising such lengthy domains.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  But then .onion - or at least the way it's done - is already there.
- ailideex 7y ago
  How do you decide which person get which name? This just gets you back to the whole ICANN problem. I can remember a couple of digits which makes my name unique. I cannot remember 1e873645-1f68-4b48-9eae-934ec717229b
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    That's just a technical problem that new infrastructure can solve by abstracting away the name. Instead of visiting 1e873645-1f68-4b48-9eae-934ec717229b.com/foo, you're just visiting "bar/foo", where 'bar' is their name. Click on the URL and the full hashed version is revealed for proper sharing. In the same way that nobody memorised Facebook's UUID of a person, they can just remember their name.

toast0 7y ago

> one where an individual can request and have a domain for life Annual payment is proof that you're still alive. AlterNIC tried settint up alternate tlds years ago, and is now gone. The problems are an alternate root is very unlikely to get consensus, and name resolution without consensus isn't very useful; and you're not going to be able to have friendly names without an arbiter to decide who gets pmlnr.example.

danShumway 7y ago
> Annual payment is proof that you're still alive. I don't want my domains sold after I die, and I don't want my bookmarks to stop working after someone else dies. The only parts of a website that I want tied to someone's lifespan is: - whether or not the site is updated, and - how the site is hosted If I could snap my fingers and magically figure out a way to make the site's hosting outlive the person, I'd do that as well. For me, extend GP's original statement to read > one where an individual can request a domain and have it removed from the market permanently.
- horsawlarway 7y ago
  Your vision sounds pretty terrible. At a very cursory glance it seems fine - I don't want my information web to degrade. Once you dig even a little bit into this, though... you get a quagmire of old and useless information. Outdated sites never go away. They just become a constant burden on the whole system. Information that's been refuted and invalidated years back is still alive and kicking because a domain exists and can be indexed, and there's no chance to ever update it, since the owner is long since dead. The longer this lasts, the more and more noise to information you get. It's like having an incredible information web and then giving it dementia.
  - enobrev 7y ago
    I think it would be absolutely incredible to peruse old blogs and websites from a century ago. Clippings from 75 year old newspapers or letters are interesting for plenty of reasons. The cost of things; The news of the day; The writing style. Imagine direct access to this sort of content from 750 years ago!

thinkmassive 7y ago

Another approach worth keeping an eye on is the Ethereum Name Service (ENS): https://ens.domains https://ens.domains Personally I find tor to be most usable out of the approaches you listed, but obviously not for memorable names.

marknadal 7y ago

Simple, don't have reserved names! Nobody owns our language. Martti Malmi, Satoshi's first Bitcoin contributor, solved this several years ago: https://github.com/irislib/iris/blob/master/README.md#identity-verifications https://github.com/irislib/iris/blob/master/README.md#identi...

nixpulvis 7y ago

Remember, there only 2 real hard problems in computer science. Cache invalidation and naming things. P.S. I'll add, that on the issue of a personal identifier, we need to remember that not everyone wants a public address. In fact most people keep this kind of information quite private. A virtual address is no different, unless we explicitly make two kinds.

woah 7y ago

DNS is probably one of the most popular subjects of the decentralize everything movement. Not that any of the solutions have really caught on though.

thinkmassive 7y ago

Another project to keep an eye on is OpenAlias https://openalias.org/ https://openalias.org/