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Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

254 points by LinuxBender 7y ago

troquerre 7y ago
PSA if you had over 15 followers on GitHub by August 2018 you were likely included in the Handshake airdrop. Basically they developed a way to give each dev in the airdrop 4662 coins each (worth a lot since current market price is $0.50[1]). These instructions walk through what the claiming process is like, which can only be done after block 2016 in a day or so https://namebase.io/airdrop https://namebase.io/airdrop. [1] https://namebase.io https://namebase.io
- withinboredom 7y ago
  I hope it updates the ssh keys, because I’m pretty sure I roll mine every couple of years.
  - troquerre 7y ago
    It doesn't update with SSH keys because the tree is static, but it was updated within a few months ago, so if you claim now (in 1-2 days when claiming is enabled on the mainnet) it should work with your existing keys.
- stubish 7y ago
  Interesting they are soliciting personalities, rather than infrastructure, sysadmins and others who might have more power to push Handshake. Leaves out a lot of the Great Old Ones too, like say a big hunk of Debian and Ubuntu developers. Or Firefox devs, who have a lot of power here. Lots of projects predate Github. When I looked, I'm honestly surprised how many followers I have there - why would you follow me personally? Rather than the projects? I wouldn't follow me. Seems rather creepy. Edit: I see elsewhere there have been cash drops to Debian, Arch and probably some other projects. Which makes sense.
  - SkyMarshal 7y ago
    It’s not soliciting personalities but rather developers who have made things useful to at least 15 other developers, at least on Github. They also needed exposed public keys to airdrop to, which limited the airdrop to Github and the WoT strong set.
    - tasuki 7y ago
      > who have made things useful to at least 15 other developers Then why not look how many stars one's repos have? That seems a much better metric to me. A friend of mine has hundreds of stars on their repos but only 30 followers. I have around a hundred stars on my repos but only 20 followers. Conversely, I've seen people who are into networking, have a lot of GitHub followers, and no meaningful repos at all.
- tasuki 7y ago
  Tieshun, I fulfill those requirements, submitted the claim, was told the Handshake coins would appear in Namebase within half an hour, and... they didn't. The experience was smooth, except for the last part, which was a little underwhelming. Time to read more about Handshake I guess?
  - troquerre 7y ago
    Sorry I should've made this more clear. Txs aren't enabled until block 2016 (in less than 6 hours). The claiming process will only work after then. If you try again after block 2016 it should work! It's currently on block 1970 https://hnsxplorer.com/ https://hnsxplorer.com/
    - tasuki 7y ago
      It was clearly written in the non-interactive part of the instructions. Apparently I can't read. Thank you for your patience!
      - troquerre 7y ago
        Well either way, we’re passed block 2016 now so you can claim! Were you able to try it out?
ruyden1000 7y ago
This is golden, it reminds the time when Let's encrypt started. Something that is challenging and can change a lot the direction of the internet.
- RL_Quine 7y ago
  Nice astroturfing.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please read and follow the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
  >Created: 40 min ago
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't shame users for creating new accounts. I appreciate that you're trying to protect HN, but we definitely don't want to attack people for joining the site. The damage that does in the case of a genuine new user is much worse than the benefit it provides in the fake user case. If you suspect abuse, please follow the site guidelines and email hn@ycombinator.com instead so we can look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- omani 7y ago
  lol you really think we fall for your comment?
  - dang 7y ago
    Please read and follow the site guidelines when posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
djsumdog 7y ago
I don't see information on how names are handled. I know Zeronet started the entire .bit (which can be purchased with NameCoin). Are there reserved TLDs for handshake? Has ICANN said anything about .bit or .onion TLDs? I suspect TOR is big enough they won't touch .onion, but if they sell .bit, you'll then have some name overlap/conflicts.
- lifty 7y ago
  The handshake namespace overlaps with the normal domain name system, but they reserve the top 100k domains for the current owners. My only concern is the long term sync between DNS and the old system. But I like the project and I think it’s a good way forward for replacing the current centralized DNS and PKI system
  - RL_Quine 7y ago
    That's just an immediate non-starter then. Nobody is following all of these esoteric systems in the case that one of them gains marketshare, it guarantees that people will be phished and defrauded as soon as they use it. We had this issue with namecoin already, where people went and registered names of prominent people and tried to use that to solicit fraudulent donations.
    - lifty 7y ago
      That’s a fair point and I share the same concern. I would have allowed anyone that owns a domain and can prove it, to get their domain for free in the new system. You could do the proof similarly to how Let’s Encrypt does it
  - pinhead26 7y ago
    I'd say it extends more than overlap: If a name is not found on the Handshake chain, the resolver "falls back" to legacy ICANN DNS. Since all current gTLDs are reserved as well as the top 100k, there won't be any overlap for a while.
    - 7y ago
jspaetzel 7y ago
First impression: Great another ICO. Second impression: Not a wildly outlandish idea but im not sure if it's a good idea either. Decentralized and automated registrar with a concept of renewals. Nifty. I'm not really sure how the economics here work out.. Could I scoop up a few million names early on and then hold them forever? Has that already happened? Could this enable anonymous registration? Would these things make users trust these names more or less?
- pinhead26 7y ago
  The project raised $10M and then gave 100% of it away to open source projects. They receive some HNS tokens in return. There is a massive airdrop of coins to hundreds of thousands of guthub users, spreading out the money supply to people who might be the most interested in using the system. In other words, this is the least ICO-y new blockchain in a decade. Names roll out over 52 weeks: HashName(name) % 52 = week number that a name is available. So that should attenuate squatting. Also bidding on names locks up coins for something like 2 weeks, so it's hard to bid on too many names.
  - jspaetzel 7y ago
    Well. That's a nice publicity stunt. lets see how they get their investment back. It's nice that this project does some good. https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd/blob/56c83ca7344def512ef861f452bff91d43bc8f52/lib/protocol/consensus.js#L88 https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd/blob/56c83ca7344def512e... So if I read this right Creators get: 102mi coins Sponsors get: 102mi coins they are airdropping about 952mi coins to users on github to the tune of 4,246 per user. So they're collecting about 20% of all coins initially dropped. That's slightly more then some. And at the value listed on https://www.namebase.io/ https://www.namebase.io/ that adds up to some 102,000,000 * $0.44 = $44mi. Ok, so it's not an ICO exactly, instead they raised VC funds which is expecting a return by selling coins. I've just spent a few minutes looking through the website, docs, and a little code. And I have no idea how an end user will use these names. Everything polished about it is for trading coins not real world usage. Sounds like every other crypto coin.
    - 7y ago
RL_Quine 7y ago
They've somehow managed to make the two least optimal choices of language possible. The full node daemon, hsd, is written in Javascript. A non type safe language with poor package management for consensus critical code. We also have a light client, hnsd, which is written in C A non memory safe and error prone language for client code people would run on their systems as root.
- lifty 7y ago
  I hope more implementations will become available. It’s a decent start, since the C based light client doesn’t expose any services.
  - RL_Quine 7y ago
    You can't say that a C daemon interacting with a network has no attack surface, especially as the thing runs as root. It promiscuously makes outgoing TCP connections to an unauthenticated P2P network, so given enough time you'll eventually interact with an attacker if there is one.
- pinhead26 7y ago
  Well at least you don't have to worry about package management, all the dependencies are built by the organization either from scratch or with vendored code. Re: JavaScript, you should take a look at the code in repo, it's excellent. There is a such thing as great Javascript code and bcoin/hsd are prime examples.
  - heartbeats 7y ago
    Better the cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory you know than the left-pad you don't.
  - RL_Quine 7y ago
    I'm very aware of bcoin. https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/bcoin https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/bcoin Many steps of indirection away we find things like this include. https://github.com/juliangruber/isarray/blob/master/index.js https://github.com/juliangruber/isarray/blob/master/index.js module.exports = Array.isArray || function (arr) { return toString.call(arr) == '[object Array]'; }; Javascript is an absolute joke of a language.
the_snooze 7y ago
Looks like this is similar to Namecoin? https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/namespaces.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/namespace...
- SkyMarshal 7y ago
  Similar but attempts to solve some of the problems with it, like trademark squatting and including an on-chain market for TLDs.
jimmysong 7y ago
This has been tried. It's called Namecoin and it failed to get much traction. I suspect that using Bitcoin instead would improve adoption dramatically instead of creating yet another token. This can be done using sidechains or something similar.
- verdverm 7y ago
  It is not the same as Namecoin. Handshake at it's core is a decentralized root zone of trust, the equivalent of ICANN. It's up to people building on it to create the registrars and such. Previous experiments were for one TLD like .bit or .eth With Handshake, every possible TLD is released over 52 weeks Even more so, it works with existing DNS infrastructure and tools. All it is doing is allowing for all TLDs and resolving them (with preference for ICANN / HNS) where the overlap occurs. It was built from the start to exist along side today's systems.
- michaelbuckbee 7y ago
  Yeah, domain registration seemed like one of the few problems that potentially (lots and lots of handwaving around the details here) could actually have been a good fit for a blockchain solution. - It's all public - It doesn't change that often - It is a data storage issue (as compared to processing) - On a per record basis it's pretty small (as compared to trying to store PNGs in the blockchain)
- troquerre 7y ago
  One of the issues with Namecoin is the issuance. You can register any name for a set price. This leads to easy squatting behavior and allows whales to buy up all the good names. Handshake built in mechanisms to improve the issuance of names (detailed in danShumway's comment) which is critical when you're working with the issuance of scarce, non-fungible assets. It's like drawing a comparison to bitcoin and bit gold. Both had the same idea, but the specifics matter.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- 7y ago
danShumway 7y ago
I know the handshake devs/maintainers are active on here. I've heard explanations from y'all about how handshake tries to solve the squatter problem. As far as I understand those explanations: - Names are released at a trickle, meaning no one can buy all of them in one go. - Names have to be constantly renewed (it's not a buy-once-keep-forever scheme), and (correct me if I'm wrong), you can't buy 10 years out in advance. - A large portion of the initial names are reserved for Open Source developers, under the assumption that squatting won't be so much of a problem if they get first pick. It's still not clear to me how this solves resource scarcity. - If names are released at a trickle, does this mean I might want to register a domain for a project and there literally won't be any able available for me to choose from? - If names have to be renewed on a year-by-year basis, is there any mechanism for archival? Won't this be strictly worse for link rot? - If names are released at a trickle, doesn't this create an even greater incentive for both good and bad actors to grab them as soon as they become available? I'm mildly interested in Handshake because based on very limited research it seems in general to be an improvement over what we have. I get that perfect is the enemy of the good, I would take almost any improvement over the existing system. But at the same time, I still just don't understand how this helps solve the squatter problem -- every once and a while I ask and get an explanation, and then think about it for a while and end up having more questions. My perspective is, we want everyone to be online. We want everyone to have their own blog, we want people to be able to create websites on impulse. And we want resilient, long-term links that can serve as permanent addresses for content. The idea of combating squatters is based on the assumption that domain names will continue to be a scarce resource. But you fundamentally can't have domains be a limited resource that are difficult to hoard if you also want random/poor elementary school kids to be able to buy them. Handshake talks about solving Zooko's triangle: human-meaningful, decentralized, or secure. But the way I originally heard Zooko's triangle explained to me (which may have been wrong) was: human-meaningful, secure, high-availability. Am I correct in assuming that in the second version, Handshake is optimized for human-meaningful and secure at the expense of high-availability? That domains will continue to be a limited, scarce resource that are susceptible to hoarding by people with lots of money? Or are there other mechanisms here that I don't understand?
- troquerre 7y ago
uberdru 7y ago
Does putting self-signed certs on a blockchain really solve the problem?
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  Everyone can put self-signed cert on a blockchain. You need to prove that you control the domain. Easiest way to prove that is to ask your registrar. And if your registrar will sign this fact you don't even need to ask him. So you naturally will come to DNS and DNSSec. And all standards are already here: deploy DNSSec, put TLSA record and it's done. It's a solved problem, just not widely supported.
  - uberdru 7y ago
    "prove that you control the domain"? isn't that the rub? sounds a bit circular to me at least. there doesn't seem to be any solid replacement for the existing centralized trust authorities. what am i missing?
    - vbezhenar 7y ago
      As long as we're talking about conventional DNS, it's centralized by design. And if you want to build a better DNS, you can just use onion: domain is public key and you can even mine good domains (facebookcorewwwi.onion).
troquerre 7y ago
Shameless plug - if anyone wants to try using Handshake, we built a registrar for Handshake domains and an exchange for Handshake coins (HNS) at https://namebase.io https://namebase.io. We just launched last week but there's already been a lot of usage so it'll be interesting to see what people do with their Handshake domains when they become available.
joosters 7y ago
Great, what the world really needs is a hideously inefficient set of distributed DNS servers that are permanently eating 100% CPU to do their proof-of-work blockchain mining crap. The page hand-waves this away by claiming (with no good reason) that it will all be renewable energy. Just like bitcoin in China, right?
- verdverm 7y ago
  You missed what HS does. It does not run the DNS system, it extends what ICANN does. The same DNS tools and infra are still used
josh2600 7y ago
I am actually curious because I don't fully understand how Handshake works... I believe it allows you to setup a K of N threshold signature scheme for changing DNS, which, is kinda cool, but I don't understand if this would help BGP route hijacking. Edit: I guess this is a replacement for ICANN not the inter-carrier routing protocols, which is, interesting. Is the point here that if DNS authorities switch to Handshake for authoritative DNS it will be harder to hijack routes? I would love an explanation, sorry it I'm being dense!!
- pinhead26 7y ago
  It doesn't address BGP, just DNS. You are correct about the signature scheme though. In fact, names are owned by unspent transaction outputs, exactly like Bitcoin. Meaning you can own a name with whatever weird script you want (2 of 3 before a certain date, 4 of 5 after...) you can even add scripts that allow certain keys to update a DNS resource, but a different key to transfer the name.
matt2000 7y ago
Decentralized systems generally have pretty complicated governance models and technology to support them, making it easy to get lost in the details. I've found when trying to assess things like this it's best to find a critical question and find out the details of the answer. For the case of decentralized naming, one interesting question tends to be "What happens when someone registers cocacola.com?" Usually the answer to that question reveals whether the system is A) not in fact decentralized, or B) not compatible with laws in most jurisdictions. Anyway, not necessarily a specific critique of this system since I don't know the answer to the question in this case. More just a useful framework I've found to assess distributed systems without getting mired in execution details.
- troquerre 7y ago
  All the existing TLDs like .com and .net are blacklisted so that only the TLD owners can register them. The claiming process for blacklisted TLDs uses DNSSEC so there are no third parties involved in the process. In addition, the top 100k Alexa domains are pre-registered so that only the domain owners can register those domains as TLDs (only google.com can register .google). That is done through DNSSEC as well.
  - xoa 7y ago
    This is useful info and should really, really be in the FAQ. Like, right at the top, because I don't think it's clear right now at all what happens to regular domain holders using them for email, their own services, intranets and so forth. If those in the current registrar system have a reliable path to transition/try it out at some point that's a good start. Edit to add: your namebase.io FAQ seems a lot more useful than the handshake one. For starters it clarifies that there is a confusing terminology difference, where I guess the handshake people are using "domain" to mean "TLD" and "subdomain" to refer to what everyone typically calls a domain. So a core offering of this system appears to be a blockchain based replacement to the $150k+ (or whatever it is these days) "get your own arbitrary TLD" thing ICANN did, "anyone" gets to register their own TLD. But that raises more questions, like where the actual hardware behind all this goes particularly for existing TLDs which are blacklisted.
mankyd 7y ago
> mail became Gmail, usenet became reddit, blog replies became facebook and Medium, pingbacks became twitter, squid became Cloudflare, even gnutella became The Pirate Bay. Centralization exists because there is a need to manage spam, griefing, and sockpuppet/sybil attacks. No, centralization exists because users don't care about the protocol. Users care about the brand. It's way easier to use FB than it is to say "choose your hosting provider. Each one has a slightly different set of features. Then link with other people you care about, all of whom may be using different providers that you need to pay special attention to." With FB, I click "send a friend request" and then move on with my day. And that's just one example.
- iamnothere 7y ago
  > No, centralization exists because users don't care about the protocol. Users care about the brand. Brand is a proxy for the level of functionality delivered by that brand. People didn't switch to GMail because it was a "cool" brand, they switched because the spam filtering worked, Google gives you a ton of free space (a problem at the time), and it didn't have obtrusive banner ads. This was passed on by word of mouth, and now GMail is popular. > It's way easier to use FB than it is to say "choose your hosting provider. Each one has a slightly different set of features. Then link with other people you care about, all of whom may be using different providers that you need to pay special attention to." With FB, I click "send a friend request" and then move on with my day. And that's just one example. Exactly my point, the UX is better and the network effect ensures that many/most of your friends are already there. It's not about branding, it's about ease of use.
  - unlinked_dll 7y ago
    > People didn't switch to GMail because it was a "cool" brand In the early days of gmail when you needed an invite code, it definitely was a status symbol to have that @gmail.com on your email address. And at the time, the actual functionality of gmail was far less significant than the fact it was free and decoupled from your internet provider, although you're right the storage capacity on a free email was unheard of at the time.
dependenttypes 7y ago
I really do not see the point. Naming not only is not important but it also causes issues with trust. I think that the solution that tor/i2p went with is much better.
dang 7y ago
A thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17673922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17673922
xoa 7y ago
:\ As has been the pattern with all these decentralized DNS schemes, the FAQ doesn't cover the most utterly basic question: "I currently have one or more domains that I use extensively for my own life/work. How do I transfer those to try this new scheme? How much actual dollars/euros/yen/yuan/... does it cost, not mystery blockchain-whatevers but predictable real money? Does this new scheme harm me?" Shouldn't an experimental system in particular want regular tech people with personal domains trying it out? We'd probably be more willing to give it a whirl (with fallbacks) since it's more for our own private use. But instead it's all about trademark holders and the Alexa 100k and so on, which is important too but it seems like most such domain holders would be a lot more conservative. And I've had a growing suspicion that the last part of the question doesn't get answered clearly because the answer is "you may get screwed, we are ideologues who think that people should be able to take your domain if you're not rich enough to defend it." I mean, right now I don't in fact see the current DNS system as horrible. Cloudflare and others are pretty reliable registrars and companies to deal with. A .com is about $8, .net and .org both about $10. A known amount of $200 or so and I'm set for 10 years, and I consider that a good thing. I've had my domains for nearly 20 years now, they're core to my online identity and personal infrastructure. Same for most businesses, DNS sits at the center of everything. My concerns are about ICANN allowed price increases due to monopoly, and whether bad actors could somehow try to claim my domain and how I'd fight that as an individual. But I don't see answers in the FAQ to how this would help answer those. My personal domains aren't in Alexa top-whatever so it sounds like handshake will auction them off. There is a "renewal fee" after that but it's handwave-y: >Renewals for names are annual and cost a standard network fee A standard network fee of what? $1? $10? $100? It can vary by thousands of percent at random like so many cryptocurrencies? How long is the renewal window? Can it be paid upfront? What happens if it gets missed? Is any of this predictable? I simply don't see any brass tacks implementation stuff here. It's a bunch of high level hoohah about the evils of centralization without any acknowledgement of how centralization can be useful and efficient too and how they deal with that. The word "federation" does not appear at all, which is another important approach/aspect. It sounds worryingly like a common "religious" approach where people take a tool (like decentralization) and turn it into a goal in and of itself.
- troquerre 7y ago
sfusato 7y ago
Went through the FAQ's, but still didn't understood much about how this is supposed to work alongside ICANN/current DNS system. Well, I didn't got Bitcoin the first 2 times either. 1. "Browsing the web with human readable names is what Internet users have gotten acclimated to." => give me an example of a "handshake" domain name in this case 2. I have some domains/sites not so popular (not in the first 100k Alexa domains). I will only hear about "Handshake" in 5 years time when Handshake completely replaced what we are using today, by which time, someone else might have "registered my domain names". What do I do? Obviously I can prove I own my .com/.net. To site failed to answer some basic questions/concerns or give some real world use case scenarios.
- sfusato 7y ago
  Own answer to 2: So all existing TLDs are by default "pre-reserved". Secondly, the 100k top Alexa sites refers to the inability to register a ".whatever" if that "whatever.some_tld" is in top 100k Alexa. So, basically this is "pre-reserving" "gTLD". In my first impression, these 2 things were somehow correlated.
- xur17 7y ago
  > I have some domains/sites not so popular (not in the first 100k Alexa domains). I will only hear about "Handshake" in 5 years time when Handshake completely replaced what we are using today, by which time, someone else might have "registered my domain names". What do I do? Obviously I can prove I own my .com/.net. This is one part that Handshake does not explain very well. The existing domains and tlds that icann owns will continue to work moving forward. The top 100k Alexa domains bit works like this: For the top 100k alexa domains, the owner receives the root of the domain as a domain in Handshake (ex: the owner of `example.com` receives the domain `example` in Handshake). All `*.com`, etc domains continue to operate as they have in the past.
  - withinboredom 7y ago
    What happens if someone gets “amazing/“ and then I pay icann to get .amazing?
Ajedi32 7y ago
This is a great idea with one easily correctable but nonetheless fatal flaw: it's an all-or-nothing preposition. If users choose to use Handshake as their DNS roots, they will no longer be able to access websites which only exist on ICANN's root zone. Assuming I'm not mistaken and that really is how Handshake is set up (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), then IMO the whole project is essentially dead on arrival. There's no chance they're going to be able to convince millions of large websites to register on a new DNS root overnight. And even if they did somehow managed to convince 80% of websites move to the new system, users _still_ wouldn't switch over because doing so would effectively break 20% of the internet for them. It's a real shame, because this problem would be trivially avoidable if they simply allowed the existing TLDs use the ICANN roots and confined Handshake domains to their own TLD (.handshake maybe). That way, adoption could happen slowly over time and users could switch over to the Handshake roots with no downsides. As-is though this is simply unworkable.
- xur17 7y ago
  > If users choose to use Handshake as their DNS roots, they will no longer be able to access websites which only exist on ICANN's root zone. This is not true. You can setup Handshake to be your resolver, and it will resolve both domains on handshake, and legacy domains from icann.
  - Ajedi32 7y ago
    Then what's this paragraph in the FAQ about? > Existing TLDs and over 100,000 Alexa websites are reserved on the Handshake blockchain. Upon removing collisions, generic, and exclusions (e.g. 1 or 2 character names), approximately 80,000 names remain. Using the root key and DNSSEC, domain owners can cryptographically prove ownership to the Handshake blockchain to claim names. Does Handshake control existing (`.com`, `.org`, etc.) domain names or don't they? If they do, then what happens when a DNS entry in Handshake's roots contradicts what's in the ICANN roots? If Handshake wins conflicts, then that breaks the internet for existing users.
    - xur17 7y ago
aSplash0fDerp 7y ago
Seeing how Internet 1.0 is getting cannibalized by big business and governments, I'm hoping to see HS and other orgs start working on an offline mesh network and devise a completely new system of information distribution. Humanity appears to be changing the public park infrastructure of the Internet into a paid-access theme park, with [them/someone else] writing the rules. It doesn't look like the righteous, tech illiterates, political manipulators or shareholder driven groups are going to relent. The Internet used to be filled with raw data, but in the age of centralized, walled garden curating, the essence of the information superhighway has been lost. It would be cool if they could pioneer a new way to replicate data in the age of autonomous vehicles or use the Internet to transfer volumes of data for offline nodes to broadcast and reimagine DNS and the other fundamental tools to make something like that resilient. If they could remove most/all of the ads, marketing, monetization and censorship from the data, we might see another generation experience the raw data bliss many of use were raised on in the pre-dot.com era. It was truly something special and felt like the world (of knowledge) was at your fingertips (instead of something slimey on the other end).
- Proven 7y ago
  > Seeing how Internet 1.0 is getting cannibalized by big business and governments How is it cannibalized? It is bigger and cheaper than ever before. To your anti-business comment, HS runs on an ICO powered platform. Isn't that business? It may not be big business but it certainly wouldn't be small if it were to replace a TLD. > The Internet used to be filled with raw data, but in the age of centralized, walled garden curating, the essence of the information superhighway has been lost. You mean when it was small enough so that it could be funded entirely by taxpayer money? > It was truly something special and felt like the world (of knowledge) was at your fingertips (instead of something slimey on the other end). Sadly that hasn't ended - governments are still burning pubic money like before, the only thing is now it's a drop in the. bucket. Ideally that spending would go down to zero but we have to be patient.
withinboredom 7y ago
The only one I wanted isn’t released for a whole year, lucky me
Proven 7y ago
A freaking ICO (shitcoin). Had I know that I wouldn’t have bothered to read anything about it

254 points by LinuxBender 7y ago

PSA if you had over 15 followers on GitHub by August 2018 you were likely included in the Handshake airdrop. Basically they developed a way to give each dev in the airdrop 4662 coins each (worth a lot since current market price is $0.50[1]). These instructions walk through what the claiming process is like, which can only be done after block 2016 in a day or so https://namebase.io/airdrop https://namebase.io/airdrop. [1] https://namebase.io https://namebase.io

withinboredom 7y ago
I hope it updates the ssh keys, because I’m pretty sure I roll mine every couple of years.
- troquerre 7y ago
  It doesn't update with SSH keys because the tree is static, but it was updated within a few months ago, so if you claim now (in 1-2 days when claiming is enabled on the mainnet) it should work with your existing keys.
stubish 7y ago
Interesting they are soliciting personalities, rather than infrastructure, sysadmins and others who might have more power to push Handshake. Leaves out a lot of the Great Old Ones too, like say a big hunk of Debian and Ubuntu developers. Or Firefox devs, who have a lot of power here. Lots of projects predate Github. When I looked, I'm honestly surprised how many followers I have there - why would you follow me personally? Rather than the projects? I wouldn't follow me. Seems rather creepy. Edit: I see elsewhere there have been cash drops to Debian, Arch and probably some other projects. Which makes sense.
- SkyMarshal 7y ago
  It’s not soliciting personalities but rather developers who have made things useful to at least 15 other developers, at least on Github. They also needed exposed public keys to airdrop to, which limited the airdrop to Github and the WoT strong set.
  - tasuki 7y ago
    > who have made things useful to at least 15 other developers Then why not look how many stars one's repos have? That seems a much better metric to me. A friend of mine has hundreds of stars on their repos but only 30 followers. I have around a hundred stars on my repos but only 20 followers. Conversely, I've seen people who are into networking, have a lot of GitHub followers, and no meaningful repos at all.
tasuki 7y ago
Tieshun, I fulfill those requirements, submitted the claim, was told the Handshake coins would appear in Namebase within half an hour, and... they didn't. The experience was smooth, except for the last part, which was a little underwhelming. Time to read more about Handshake I guess?
- troquerre 7y ago
  Sorry I should've made this more clear. Txs aren't enabled until block 2016 (in less than 6 hours). The claiming process will only work after then. If you try again after block 2016 it should work! It's currently on block 1970 https://hnsxplorer.com/ https://hnsxplorer.com/
  - tasuki 7y ago
    It was clearly written in the non-interactive part of the instructions. Apparently I can't read. Thank you for your patience!
    - troquerre 7y ago
      Well either way, we’re passed block 2016 now so you can claim! Were you able to try it out?

ruyden1000 7y ago

This is golden, it reminds the time when Let's encrypt started. Something that is challenging and can change a lot the direction of the internet.

RL_Quine 7y ago
Nice astroturfing.
- dang 7y ago
  Please read and follow the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
>Created: 40 min ago
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't shame users for creating new accounts. I appreciate that you're trying to protect HN, but we definitely don't want to attack people for joining the site. The damage that does in the case of a genuine new user is much worse than the benefit it provides in the fake user case. If you suspect abuse, please follow the site guidelines and email hn@ycombinator.com instead so we can look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
omani 7y ago
lol you really think we fall for your comment?
- dang 7y ago
  Please read and follow the site guidelines when posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

djsumdog 7y ago

I don't see information on how names are handled. I know Zeronet started the entire .bit (which can be purchased with NameCoin). Are there reserved TLDs for handshake? Has ICANN said anything about .bit or .onion TLDs? I suspect TOR is big enough they won't touch .onion, but if they sell .bit, you'll then have some name overlap/conflicts.

lifty 7y ago
The handshake namespace overlaps with the normal domain name system, but they reserve the top 100k domains for the current owners. My only concern is the long term sync between DNS and the old system. But I like the project and I think it’s a good way forward for replacing the current centralized DNS and PKI system
- RL_Quine 7y ago
  That's just an immediate non-starter then. Nobody is following all of these esoteric systems in the case that one of them gains marketshare, it guarantees that people will be phished and defrauded as soon as they use it. We had this issue with namecoin already, where people went and registered names of prominent people and tried to use that to solicit fraudulent donations.
  - lifty 7y ago
    That’s a fair point and I share the same concern. I would have allowed anyone that owns a domain and can prove it, to get their domain for free in the new system. You could do the proof similarly to how Let’s Encrypt does it
- pinhead26 7y ago
  I'd say it extends more than overlap: If a name is not found on the Handshake chain, the resolver "falls back" to legacy ICANN DNS. Since all current gTLDs are reserved as well as the top 100k, there won't be any overlap for a while.
  - 7y ago

jspaetzel 7y ago

First impression: Great another ICO. Second impression: Not a wildly outlandish idea but im not sure if it's a good idea either. Decentralized and automated registrar with a concept of renewals. Nifty. I'm not really sure how the economics here work out.. Could I scoop up a few million names early on and then hold them forever? Has that already happened? Could this enable anonymous registration? Would these things make users trust these names more or less?

pinhead26 7y ago
The project raised $10M and then gave 100% of it away to open source projects. They receive some HNS tokens in return. There is a massive airdrop of coins to hundreds of thousands of guthub users, spreading out the money supply to people who might be the most interested in using the system. In other words, this is the least ICO-y new blockchain in a decade. Names roll out over 52 weeks: HashName(name) % 52 = week number that a name is available. So that should attenuate squatting. Also bidding on names locks up coins for something like 2 weeks, so it's hard to bid on too many names.
- jspaetzel 7y ago
  Well. That's a nice publicity stunt. lets see how they get their investment back. It's nice that this project does some good. https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd/blob/56c83ca7344def512ef861f452bff91d43bc8f52/lib/protocol/consensus.js#L88 https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd/blob/56c83ca7344def512e... So if I read this right Creators get: 102mi coins Sponsors get: 102mi coins they are airdropping about 952mi coins to users on github to the tune of 4,246 per user. So they're collecting about 20% of all coins initially dropped. That's slightly more then some. And at the value listed on https://www.namebase.io/ https://www.namebase.io/ that adds up to some 102,000,000 * $0.44 = $44mi. Ok, so it's not an ICO exactly, instead they raised VC funds which is expecting a return by selling coins. I've just spent a few minutes looking through the website, docs, and a little code. And I have no idea how an end user will use these names. Everything polished about it is for trading coins not real world usage. Sounds like every other crypto coin.
  - 7y ago

RL_Quine 7y ago

They've somehow managed to make the two least optimal choices of language possible. The full node daemon, hsd, is written in Javascript. A non type safe language with poor package management for consensus critical code. We also have a light client, hnsd, which is written in C A non memory safe and error prone language for client code people would run on their systems as root.

lifty 7y ago
I hope more implementations will become available. It’s a decent start, since the C based light client doesn’t expose any services.
- RL_Quine 7y ago
  You can't say that a C daemon interacting with a network has no attack surface, especially as the thing runs as root. It promiscuously makes outgoing TCP connections to an unauthenticated P2P network, so given enough time you'll eventually interact with an attacker if there is one.
pinhead26 7y ago
Well at least you don't have to worry about package management, all the dependencies are built by the organization either from scratch or with vendored code. Re: JavaScript, you should take a look at the code in repo, it's excellent. There is a such thing as great Javascript code and bcoin/hsd are prime examples.
- heartbeats 7y ago
  Better the cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory you know than the left-pad you don't.
- RL_Quine 7y ago
  I'm very aware of bcoin. https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/bcoin https://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/bcoin Many steps of indirection away we find things like this include. https://github.com/juliangruber/isarray/blob/master/index.js https://github.com/juliangruber/isarray/blob/master/index.js module.exports = Array.isArray || function (arr) { return toString.call(arr) == '[object Array]'; }; Javascript is an absolute joke of a language.

the_snooze 7y ago

Looks like this is similar to Namecoin? https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/namespaces.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/namespace...

SkyMarshal 7y ago
Similar but attempts to solve some of the problems with it, like trademark squatting and including an on-chain market for TLDs.

jimmysong 7y ago

This has been tried. It's called Namecoin and it failed to get much traction. I suspect that using Bitcoin instead would improve adoption dramatically instead of creating yet another token. This can be done using sidechains or something similar.

verdverm 7y ago
It is not the same as Namecoin. Handshake at it's core is a decentralized root zone of trust, the equivalent of ICANN. It's up to people building on it to create the registrars and such. Previous experiments were for one TLD like .bit or .eth With Handshake, every possible TLD is released over 52 weeks Even more so, it works with existing DNS infrastructure and tools. All it is doing is allowing for all TLDs and resolving them (with preference for ICANN / HNS) where the overlap occurs. It was built from the start to exist along side today's systems.
michaelbuckbee 7y ago
Yeah, domain registration seemed like one of the few problems that potentially (lots and lots of handwaving around the details here) could actually have been a good fit for a blockchain solution. - It's all public - It doesn't change that often - It is a data storage issue (as compared to processing) - On a per record basis it's pretty small (as compared to trying to store PNGs in the blockchain)
troquerre 7y ago
One of the issues with Namecoin is the issuance. You can register any name for a set price. This leads to easy squatting behavior and allows whales to buy up all the good names. Handshake built in mechanisms to improve the issuance of names (detailed in danShumway's comment) which is critical when you're working with the issuance of scarce, non-fungible assets. It's like drawing a comparison to bitcoin and bit gold. Both had the same idea, but the specifics matter.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
7y ago

danShumway 7y ago

I know the handshake devs/maintainers are active on here. I've heard explanations from y'all about how handshake tries to solve the squatter problem. As far as I understand those explanations: - Names are released at a trickle, meaning no one can buy all of them in one go. - Names have to be constantly renewed (it's not a buy-once-keep-forever scheme), and (correct me if I'm wrong), you can't buy 10 years out in advance. - A large portion of the initial names are reserved for Open Source developers, under the assumption that squatting won't be so much of a problem if they get first pick. It's still not clear to me how this solves resource scarcity. - If names are released at a trickle, does this mean I might want to register a domain for a project and there literally won't be any able available for me to choose from? - If names have to be renewed on a year-by-year basis, is there any mechanism for archival? Won't this be strictly worse for link rot? - If names are released at a trickle, doesn't this create an even greater incentive for both good and bad actors to grab them as soon as they become available? I'm mildly interested in Handshake because based on very limited research it seems in general to be an improvement over what we have. I get that perfect is the enemy of the good, I would take almost any improvement over the existing system. But at the same time, I still just don't understand how this helps solve the squatter problem -- every once and a while I ask and get an explanation, and then think about it for a while and end up having more questions. My perspective is, we want everyone to be online. We want everyone to have their own blog, we want people to be able to create websites on impulse. And we want resilient, long-term links that can serve as permanent addresses for content. The idea of combating squatters is based on the assumption that domain names will continue to be a scarce resource. But you fundamentally can't have domains be a limited resource that are difficult to hoard if you also want random/poor elementary school kids to be able to buy them. Handshake talks about solving Zooko's triangle: human-meaningful, decentralized, or secure. But the way I originally heard Zooko's triangle explained to me (which may have been wrong) was: human-meaningful, secure, high-availability. Am I correct in assuming that in the second version, Handshake is optimized for human-meaningful and secure at the expense of high-availability? That domains will continue to be a limited, scarce resource that are susceptible to hoarding by people with lots of money? Or are there other mechanisms here that I don't understand?

troquerre 7y ago

uberdru 7y ago

Does putting self-signed certs on a blockchain really solve the problem?

vbezhenar 7y ago
Everyone can put self-signed cert on a blockchain. You need to prove that you control the domain. Easiest way to prove that is to ask your registrar. And if your registrar will sign this fact you don't even need to ask him. So you naturally will come to DNS and DNSSec. And all standards are already here: deploy DNSSec, put TLSA record and it's done. It's a solved problem, just not widely supported.
- uberdru 7y ago
  "prove that you control the domain"? isn't that the rub? sounds a bit circular to me at least. there doesn't seem to be any solid replacement for the existing centralized trust authorities. what am i missing?
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    As long as we're talking about conventional DNS, it's centralized by design. And if you want to build a better DNS, you can just use onion: domain is public key and you can even mine good domains (facebookcorewwwi.onion).

troquerre 7y ago

Shameless plug - if anyone wants to try using Handshake, we built a registrar for Handshake domains and an exchange for Handshake coins (HNS) at https://namebase.io https://namebase.io. We just launched last week but there's already been a lot of usage so it'll be interesting to see what people do with their Handshake domains when they become available.

joosters 7y ago

Great, what the world really needs is a hideously inefficient set of distributed DNS servers that are permanently eating 100% CPU to do their proof-of-work blockchain mining crap. The page hand-waves this away by claiming (with no good reason) that it will all be renewable energy. Just like bitcoin in China, right?

verdverm 7y ago
You missed what HS does. It does not run the DNS system, it extends what ICANN does. The same DNS tools and infra are still used

josh2600 7y ago

I am actually curious because I don't fully understand how Handshake works... I believe it allows you to setup a K of N threshold signature scheme for changing DNS, which, is kinda cool, but I don't understand if this would help BGP route hijacking. Edit: I guess this is a replacement for ICANN not the inter-carrier routing protocols, which is, interesting. Is the point here that if DNS authorities switch to Handshake for authoritative DNS it will be harder to hijack routes? I would love an explanation, sorry it I'm being dense!!

pinhead26 7y ago
It doesn't address BGP, just DNS. You are correct about the signature scheme though. In fact, names are owned by unspent transaction outputs, exactly like Bitcoin. Meaning you can own a name with whatever weird script you want (2 of 3 before a certain date, 4 of 5 after...) you can even add scripts that allow certain keys to update a DNS resource, but a different key to transfer the name.

matt2000 7y ago

Decentralized systems generally have pretty complicated governance models and technology to support them, making it easy to get lost in the details. I've found when trying to assess things like this it's best to find a critical question and find out the details of the answer. For the case of decentralized naming, one interesting question tends to be "What happens when someone registers cocacola.com?" Usually the answer to that question reveals whether the system is A) not in fact decentralized, or B) not compatible with laws in most jurisdictions. Anyway, not necessarily a specific critique of this system since I don't know the answer to the question in this case. More just a useful framework I've found to assess distributed systems without getting mired in execution details.

troquerre 7y ago
All the existing TLDs like .com and .net are blacklisted so that only the TLD owners can register them. The claiming process for blacklisted TLDs uses DNSSEC so there are no third parties involved in the process. In addition, the top 100k Alexa domains are pre-registered so that only the domain owners can register those domains as TLDs (only google.com can register .google). That is done through DNSSEC as well.
- xoa 7y ago
  This is useful info and should really, really be in the FAQ. Like, right at the top, because I don't think it's clear right now at all what happens to regular domain holders using them for email, their own services, intranets and so forth. If those in the current registrar system have a reliable path to transition/try it out at some point that's a good start. Edit to add: your namebase.io FAQ seems a lot more useful than the handshake one. For starters it clarifies that there is a confusing terminology difference, where I guess the handshake people are using "domain" to mean "TLD" and "subdomain" to refer to what everyone typically calls a domain. So a core offering of this system appears to be a blockchain based replacement to the $150k+ (or whatever it is these days) "get your own arbitrary TLD" thing ICANN did, "anyone" gets to register their own TLD. But that raises more questions, like where the actual hardware behind all this goes particularly for existing TLDs which are blacklisted.

mankyd 7y ago

> mail became Gmail, usenet became reddit, blog replies became facebook and Medium, pingbacks became twitter, squid became Cloudflare, even gnutella became The Pirate Bay. Centralization exists because there is a need to manage spam, griefing, and sockpuppet/sybil attacks. No, centralization exists because users don't care about the protocol. Users care about the brand. It's way easier to use FB than it is to say "choose your hosting provider. Each one has a slightly different set of features. Then link with other people you care about, all of whom may be using different providers that you need to pay special attention to." With FB, I click "send a friend request" and then move on with my day. And that's just one example.

iamnothere 7y ago
> No, centralization exists because users don't care about the protocol. Users care about the brand. Brand is a proxy for the level of functionality delivered by that brand. People didn't switch to GMail because it was a "cool" brand, they switched because the spam filtering worked, Google gives you a ton of free space (a problem at the time), and it didn't have obtrusive banner ads. This was passed on by word of mouth, and now GMail is popular. > It's way easier to use FB than it is to say "choose your hosting provider. Each one has a slightly different set of features. Then link with other people you care about, all of whom may be using different providers that you need to pay special attention to." With FB, I click "send a friend request" and then move on with my day. And that's just one example. Exactly my point, the UX is better and the network effect ensures that many/most of your friends are already there. It's not about branding, it's about ease of use.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  > People didn't switch to GMail because it was a "cool" brand In the early days of gmail when you needed an invite code, it definitely was a status symbol to have that @gmail.com on your email address. And at the time, the actual functionality of gmail was far less significant than the fact it was free and decoupled from your internet provider, although you're right the storage capacity on a free email was unheard of at the time.

dependenttypes 7y ago

I really do not see the point. Naming not only is not important but it also causes issues with trust. I think that the solution that tor/i2p went with is much better.

dang 7y ago

A thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17673922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17673922

xoa 7y ago

:\ As has been the pattern with all these decentralized DNS schemes, the FAQ doesn't cover the most utterly basic question: "I currently have one or more domains that I use extensively for my own life/work. How do I transfer those to try this new scheme? How much actual dollars/euros/yen/yuan/... does it cost, not mystery blockchain-whatevers but predictable real money? Does this new scheme harm me?" Shouldn't an experimental system in particular want regular tech people with personal domains trying it out? We'd probably be more willing to give it a whirl (with fallbacks) since it's more for our own private use. But instead it's all about trademark holders and the Alexa 100k and so on, which is important too but it seems like most such domain holders would be a lot more conservative. And I've had a growing suspicion that the last part of the question doesn't get answered clearly because the answer is "you may get screwed, we are ideologues who think that people should be able to take your domain if you're not rich enough to defend it." I mean, right now I don't in fact see the current DNS system as horrible. Cloudflare and others are pretty reliable registrars and companies to deal with. A .com is about $8, .net and .org both about $10. A known amount of $200 or so and I'm set for 10 years, and I consider that a good thing. I've had my domains for nearly 20 years now, they're core to my online identity and personal infrastructure. Same for most businesses, DNS sits at the center of everything. My concerns are about ICANN allowed price increases due to monopoly, and whether bad actors could somehow try to claim my domain and how I'd fight that as an individual. But I don't see answers in the FAQ to how this would help answer those. My personal domains aren't in Alexa top-whatever so it sounds like handshake will auction them off. There is a "renewal fee" after that but it's handwave-y: >Renewals for names are annual and cost a standard network fee A standard network fee of what? $1? $10? $100? It can vary by thousands of percent at random like so many cryptocurrencies? How long is the renewal window? Can it be paid upfront? What happens if it gets missed? Is any of this predictable? I simply don't see any brass tacks implementation stuff here. It's a bunch of high level hoohah about the evils of centralization without any acknowledgement of how centralization can be useful and efficient too and how they deal with that. The word "federation" does not appear at all, which is another important approach/aspect. It sounds worryingly like a common "religious" approach where people take a tool (like decentralization) and turn it into a goal in and of itself.

troquerre 7y ago

sfusato 7y ago

Went through the FAQ's, but still didn't understood much about how this is supposed to work alongside ICANN/current DNS system. Well, I didn't got Bitcoin the first 2 times either. 1. "Browsing the web with human readable names is what Internet users have gotten acclimated to." => give me an example of a "handshake" domain name in this case 2. I have some domains/sites not so popular (not in the first 100k Alexa domains). I will only hear about "Handshake" in 5 years time when Handshake completely replaced what we are using today, by which time, someone else might have "registered my domain names". What do I do? Obviously I can prove I own my .com/.net. To site failed to answer some basic questions/concerns or give some real world use case scenarios.

sfusato 7y ago
Own answer to 2: So all existing TLDs are by default "pre-reserved". Secondly, the 100k top Alexa sites refers to the inability to register a ".whatever" if that "whatever.some_tld" is in top 100k Alexa. So, basically this is "pre-reserving" "gTLD". In my first impression, these 2 things were somehow correlated.
xur17 7y ago
> I have some domains/sites not so popular (not in the first 100k Alexa domains). I will only hear about "Handshake" in 5 years time when Handshake completely replaced what we are using today, by which time, someone else might have "registered my domain names". What do I do? Obviously I can prove I own my .com/.net. This is one part that Handshake does not explain very well. The existing domains and tlds that icann owns will continue to work moving forward. The top 100k Alexa domains bit works like this: For the top 100k alexa domains, the owner receives the root of the domain as a domain in Handshake (ex: the owner of `example.com` receives the domain `example` in Handshake). All `*.com`, etc domains continue to operate as they have in the past.
- withinboredom 7y ago
  What happens if someone gets “amazing/“ and then I pay icann to get .amazing?

Ajedi32 7y ago

This is a great idea with one easily correctable but nonetheless fatal flaw: it's an all-or-nothing preposition. If users choose to use Handshake as their DNS roots, they will no longer be able to access websites which only exist on ICANN's root zone. Assuming I'm not mistaken and that really is how Handshake is set up (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), then IMO the whole project is essentially dead on arrival. There's no chance they're going to be able to convince millions of large websites to register on a new DNS root overnight. And even if they did somehow managed to convince 80% of websites move to the new system, users _still_ wouldn't switch over because doing so would effectively break 20% of the internet for them. It's a real shame, because this problem would be trivially avoidable if they simply allowed the existing TLDs use the ICANN roots and confined Handshake domains to their own TLD (.handshake maybe). That way, adoption could happen slowly over time and users could switch over to the Handshake roots with no downsides. As-is though this is simply unworkable.

xur17 7y ago
> If users choose to use Handshake as their DNS roots, they will no longer be able to access websites which only exist on ICANN's root zone. This is not true. You can setup Handshake to be your resolver, and it will resolve both domains on handshake, and legacy domains from icann.
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  Then what's this paragraph in the FAQ about? > Existing TLDs and over 100,000 Alexa websites are reserved on the Handshake blockchain. Upon removing collisions, generic, and exclusions (e.g. 1 or 2 character names), approximately 80,000 names remain. Using the root key and DNSSEC, domain owners can cryptographically prove ownership to the Handshake blockchain to claim names. Does Handshake control existing (`.com`, `.org`, etc.) domain names or don't they? If they do, then what happens when a DNS entry in Handshake's roots contradicts what's in the ICANN roots? If Handshake wins conflicts, then that breaks the internet for existing users.
  - xur17 7y ago

aSplash0fDerp 7y ago

Seeing how Internet 1.0 is getting cannibalized by big business and governments, I'm hoping to see HS and other orgs start working on an offline mesh network and devise a completely new system of information distribution. Humanity appears to be changing the public park infrastructure of the Internet into a paid-access theme park, with [them/someone else] writing the rules. It doesn't look like the righteous, tech illiterates, political manipulators or shareholder driven groups are going to relent. The Internet used to be filled with raw data, but in the age of centralized, walled garden curating, the essence of the information superhighway has been lost. It would be cool if they could pioneer a new way to replicate data in the age of autonomous vehicles or use the Internet to transfer volumes of data for offline nodes to broadcast and reimagine DNS and the other fundamental tools to make something like that resilient. If they could remove most/all of the ads, marketing, monetization and censorship from the data, we might see another generation experience the raw data bliss many of use were raised on in the pre-dot.com era. It was truly something special and felt like the world (of knowledge) was at your fingertips (instead of something slimey on the other end).

Proven 7y ago
> Seeing how Internet 1.0 is getting cannibalized by big business and governments How is it cannibalized? It is bigger and cheaper than ever before. To your anti-business comment, HS runs on an ICO powered platform. Isn't that business? It may not be big business but it certainly wouldn't be small if it were to replace a TLD. > The Internet used to be filled with raw data, but in the age of centralized, walled garden curating, the essence of the information superhighway has been lost. You mean when it was small enough so that it could be funded entirely by taxpayer money? > It was truly something special and felt like the world (of knowledge) was at your fingertips (instead of something slimey on the other end). Sadly that hasn't ended - governments are still burning pubic money like before, the only thing is now it's a drop in the. bucket. Ideally that spending would go down to zero but we have to be patient.

withinboredom 7y ago

The only one I wanted isn’t released for a whole year, lucky me

Proven 7y ago

A freaking ICO (shitcoin). Had I know that I wouldn’t have bothered to read anything about it