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> Names have to be renewed bi-annually. You don't need to pay a fee, you just need to submit a transaction to prove you still have access to the private key. W
by wtmt 7y ago
> Names have to be renewed bi-annually. You don't need to pay a fee, you just need to submit a transaction to prove you still have access to the private key.
When talking about email alternatives here, I see a lot of comments strongly suggesting owning a custom domain and using it. If the domain cannot be renewed and kept alive in advance for a few years, the bus factor of being the only technical person in the family could mean that they lose their emails very soon (worst case scenario where something bad happens to the technical person towards the end of the bi-annual period just before the renewal).
“You need to submit a transaction to prove you still have access to the private key” — “transaction”? “prove”? “private key”? There’s no way this is going to last if people use these domains for emails and mailboxes for their families. At least with the conventional system, it’s easy to note down simple instructions to go to a site, pay and renew. This system seems better suited for institutions that may be able to handle it (though it could be argued that even large companies fail in trivial ways, like it happened with a certificate expiry with Microsoft recently).
- danShumway 7y agoI'm not affiliated with Handshake in any way. But my assumption is that there would still be registrars that can handle this sort of thing for you, in the same way that a service like Netlify can handle setting up a static site server and renewing LetsEncrypt certificates. It's just that if you wanted to do it manually, you could.
- troquerre 7y agoExactly. We built a registrar for Handshake (https://namebase.io https://namebase.io) and our service will automatically handle renewal transactions. That said, anyone can still manage their keys and submit renewal transactions on their own if they want to do that, similar to how you can use Coinbase vs a desktop wallet for Bitcoin.
- wtmt 7y agoThanks. I’m still wary of the bi-annual renewal requirement. If I register a name today, can I renew it one year later from today to stretch it to two years from then (which would be three years from now) or would I be able to renew it for two years only near the end of the two year period? In other words, can I perpetually have it renewed to approximately two years in the future at all times? If not, that brings the same risk I talked about in my comment above (where families may not have enough time to figure things out and handle it).
- withinboredom 7y agoIt's not even that. It reads like it's a cliff. Currently under ICANN, if you fail to renew a domain, you have ~90 days to figure out that you didn't renew it before it's lost forever. Even if it's scripted to renew, it could fail for any number of reasons (lack of fiat currency, transient network failures, lack of crypto-currency, etc).
- wtmt 7y agoThanks. That makes sense. For some reason I didn’t think of concentrated service providers because I was too focused on decentralization (and to think of it, such concentrated providers are everywhere in decentralized platforms).