7 ms·

This is going to keep reoccurring. The Handshake project [1] attempts to decentralize the DNS root zone (using a blockchain what else). If, like me, you're su

by tasuki 7y ago

This is going to keep reoccurring. The Handshake project [1] attempts to decentralize the DNS root zone (using a blockchain what else). If, like me, you're suspicious about anything blockchain, a fun fact about Handshake: the developers took $10 million of VC money and donated it to Free and Open Source foundations [2]. That was actual cash donated, not magical internet money (though magical internet money was also donated). Some coins were premined. 80% of those were airdropped to GitHub users. If you had more than 15 followers in February 2019, you can still claim your airdrop [3]! (Disclaimer: this is what got me interested in Handshake) [1] https://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/ [2] https://handshake.org/grant-sponsors/ https://handshake.org/grant-sponsors/ [3] https://handshake.org/claim/ https://handshake.org/claim/

andrewstuart 7y ago
When I hear "ICO/coins/mines/tokens/blockchain" my brain switches to "scam mode" and I switch to something else.
- tasuki 7y ago
  I have the same visceral reaction. Is it possible the "scam mode" label is incorrect in this case? I guess you could say they scammed the VCs to donate their money to various nonprofits... https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1-million-from-handshake https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1... https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives-400000-from-handshake-org/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives... https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329 https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329 Modern day Robin Hood?
- 101404 7y ago
  It was the same in 2000 with anything internet, and then again some years later with Web 2.0. Simply switching to "scam mode" may sound good in a forum post, but you miss the interesting stuff too.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It's not that unjustifiable if almost every cryptocurrency-related project out there turns out to be a scam. I'm not saying nothing will ever come out of this technology - just that, at this point in time, it's wise to approach every such project as fraudlent until proven otherwise.
    - rasengan 7y ago
      > It's not that unjustifiable if almost every cryptocurrency-related project out there turns out to be a scam. Please make a list of the scams that exist within the top 200 coins. If this can’t be done or it’s a nominal percentage of them, then this statement you made is false. There are definitely a few people loudly calling projects scams on HN. That doesn’t suddenly make every project a scam - it just shows ignorance. It’s similar to racism - judge a book by its cover so to speak.
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        If one believes that the Proof of Work algorithm/behavior itself is a scam at a technological level, then the onus is on you to prove which of the Top 200 coins has a valid business model with a valid sustainable growth model. Building lots of git commits until you get a commit hash that starts with the right number of zeroes is a fascinating scam that is wasting so much computing power, energy, etc that it almost should be a crime, whether or not you believe that these git commits with lots of zeroes in the hash numbers are used for anything more than nearly criminal Ponzi Schemes beside that.
- lowwave 7y ago
  While I can't vouch for the financial incentive regarding the VC funding. From a pure technical perspective, wouldn't it be better to have a blockchain style of recording keeping instead of having the record to be in one central location?
  - tirpen 7y ago
    No. I haven't looked into this particular implementation, but most blockchains have the fundamental problem of being immutable. Storing domain names in an immutable registry seems like a legal disaster waiting to happen. What if someone registers a domain whose name contains sensitive personally identifiable information? Like www.elon-musks-SSN-is-0123456789.com? Everyone who distributes the DNS records might be in violation of the GDPR and similar laws. And similarly if the name of a domain is found to be libel.
    - thinkmassive 7y ago
      Instead of speculating, you could try to find the real answer... https://handshake.org/faq/ https://handshake.org/faq/ tl;dr: Censorship resistance is a feature, not a bug. Names are registered for a year at a time. Existing TLDs and the top 100,000 Alexa websites are reserved for existing DNS registrants.
      - brazzy 7y ago
        It very much is a bug to design your system incapable of complying with existing laws. Calling it "censorship resistance" doesn't make that noble, just dishonest. It's also funny how the FAQ explicitly claims better protection of registrants' personal information as a feature, yet according to you a complete inability to protect anyone's personal information that some puts out there is also a feature...
        dependenttypes 7y ago
        If something is leaked once it is leaked forever. Anyway, would you say the same about projects like tor or freenet? They have censorship resistance too.
x3blah 7y ago
In the short history of the Internet so far, domain names originally were free. Many of the early .com(mmercial) names, e.g., bbn.com, dec.com, etc., were registered for free. Some TLDs were non-commercial for a long time, e.g., Educase I think only began charging fees for .edu around 2006. For me, the question remains why do user have to pay for domain names. Users once had to pay for SSL certificates but it seems like Let's Encrypt found a way to work around that. Why can't the same be done for domain names. One could argue the "legitimacy" of LE certs is directly connected to, or even dependent upon, the "legitimacy" of the applicant's domain name registration. An ICANN-approved domain name registration is required to obtain a LE cert. Wonder why LE does not operate a domain name registry.
- pochamago 7y ago
  In the early days the demand for domain names was much lower. I'm not sure that there's a more fair way to distribute right now than putting a price tag on it.
- tasuki 7y ago
  > For me, the question remains why do user have to pay for domain names. Because they're scarce! Should you have `x3blah` or should I have it? If domain names are free, how do we decide who operates which domain? If I understood it right, one of the goals of Handshake is for names to be almost free. With a near-infinite number of TLDs which you can buy for as little as $0.09 (and renew for $0.02 every two years), less desired names become essentially free. Furthermore, you can become a registrar! With such a low cost (about $2 over our expected lifetime), you can charge extremely low fees for `domain.x3blah` or even give out the second level domains for free!
  - x3blah 7y ago
    What if no one gets "x3blah" and we each get some random string, e.g., an ed25519 public key. Handshake looks like it wants to create another "gold rush" for "vanity" names. We have already had that. We have already seen how it plays out. It has been a while since I read through the Handshake docs. Are there limits on how many names a single applicant/organisation could register.
DagAgren 7y ago
"Giving out money for free" isn't really something that make me think something is LESS of a scam. Giving out free money is literally what every every cryptocurrency scam does at first.
- tasuki 7y ago
  Good point. I'm not an expert on cryptocurrency scams, but if anything, I think they'd generally give away their magical internet tokens rather than US dollars. (Though I suppose magical internet tokens can be exchanged for US dollars so perhaps there isn't that much of a difference?)
  - DagAgren 7y ago
    Well, that is exactly what they are doing here too.

by tasuki 7y ago

andrewstuart 7y ago

When I hear "ICO/coins/mines/tokens/blockchain" my brain switches to "scam mode" and I switch to something else.

tasuki 7y ago
I have the same visceral reaction. Is it possible the "scam mode" label is incorrect in this case? I guess you could say they scammed the VCs to donate their money to various nonprofits... https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1-million-from-handshake https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1... https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives-400000-from-handshake-org/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives... https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329 https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329 Modern day Robin Hood?
101404 7y ago
It was the same in 2000 with anything internet, and then again some years later with Web 2.0. Simply switching to "scam mode" may sound good in a forum post, but you miss the interesting stuff too.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's not that unjustifiable if almost every cryptocurrency-related project out there turns out to be a scam. I'm not saying nothing will ever come out of this technology - just that, at this point in time, it's wise to approach every such project as fraudlent until proven otherwise.
  - rasengan 7y ago
    > It's not that unjustifiable if almost every cryptocurrency-related project out there turns out to be a scam. Please make a list of the scams that exist within the top 200 coins. If this can’t be done or it’s a nominal percentage of them, then this statement you made is false. There are definitely a few people loudly calling projects scams on HN. That doesn’t suddenly make every project a scam - it just shows ignorance. It’s similar to racism - judge a book by its cover so to speak.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      If one believes that the Proof of Work algorithm/behavior itself is a scam at a technological level, then the onus is on you to prove which of the Top 200 coins has a valid business model with a valid sustainable growth model. Building lots of git commits until you get a commit hash that starts with the right number of zeroes is a fascinating scam that is wasting so much computing power, energy, etc that it almost should be a crime, whether or not you believe that these git commits with lots of zeroes in the hash numbers are used for anything more than nearly criminal Ponzi Schemes beside that.
lowwave 7y ago
While I can't vouch for the financial incentive regarding the VC funding. From a pure technical perspective, wouldn't it be better to have a blockchain style of recording keeping instead of having the record to be in one central location?
- tirpen 7y ago
  No. I haven't looked into this particular implementation, but most blockchains have the fundamental problem of being immutable. Storing domain names in an immutable registry seems like a legal disaster waiting to happen. What if someone registers a domain whose name contains sensitive personally identifiable information? Like www.elon-musks-SSN-is-0123456789.com? Everyone who distributes the DNS records might be in violation of the GDPR and similar laws. And similarly if the name of a domain is found to be libel.
  - thinkmassive 7y ago
    Instead of speculating, you could try to find the real answer... https://handshake.org/faq/ https://handshake.org/faq/ tl;dr: Censorship resistance is a feature, not a bug. Names are registered for a year at a time. Existing TLDs and the top 100,000 Alexa websites are reserved for existing DNS registrants.
    - brazzy 7y ago
      It very much is a bug to design your system incapable of complying with existing laws. Calling it "censorship resistance" doesn't make that noble, just dishonest. It's also funny how the FAQ explicitly claims better protection of registrants' personal information as a feature, yet according to you a complete inability to protect anyone's personal information that some puts out there is also a feature...
      - dependenttypes 7y ago
        If something is leaked once it is leaked forever. Anyway, would you say the same about projects like tor or freenet? They have censorship resistance too.

x3blah 7y ago

In the short history of the Internet so far, domain names originally were free. Many of the early .com(mmercial) names, e.g., bbn.com, dec.com, etc., were registered for free. Some TLDs were non-commercial for a long time, e.g., Educase I think only began charging fees for .edu around 2006. For me, the question remains why do user have to pay for domain names. Users once had to pay for SSL certificates but it seems like Let's Encrypt found a way to work around that. Why can't the same be done for domain names. One could argue the "legitimacy" of LE certs is directly connected to, or even dependent upon, the "legitimacy" of the applicant's domain name registration. An ICANN-approved domain name registration is required to obtain a LE cert. Wonder why LE does not operate a domain name registry.

pochamago 7y ago
In the early days the demand for domain names was much lower. I'm not sure that there's a more fair way to distribute right now than putting a price tag on it.
tasuki 7y ago
> For me, the question remains why do user have to pay for domain names. Because they're scarce! Should you have `x3blah` or should I have it? If domain names are free, how do we decide who operates which domain? If I understood it right, one of the goals of Handshake is for names to be almost free. With a near-infinite number of TLDs which you can buy for as little as $0.09 (and renew for $0.02 every two years), less desired names become essentially free. Furthermore, you can become a registrar! With such a low cost (about $2 over our expected lifetime), you can charge extremely low fees for `domain.x3blah` or even give out the second level domains for free!
- x3blah 7y ago
  What if no one gets "x3blah" and we each get some random string, e.g., an ed25519 public key. Handshake looks like it wants to create another "gold rush" for "vanity" names. We have already had that. We have already seen how it plays out. It has been a while since I read through the Handshake docs. Are there limits on how many names a single applicant/organisation could register.

DagAgren 7y ago

"Giving out money for free" isn't really something that make me think something is LESS of a scam. Giving out free money is literally what every every cryptocurrency scam does at first.

tasuki 7y ago
Good point. I'm not an expert on cryptocurrency scams, but if anything, I think they'd generally give away their magical internet tokens rather than US dollars. (Though I suppose magical internet tokens can be exchanged for US dollars so perhaps there isn't that much of a difference?)
- DagAgren 7y ago
  Well, that is exactly what they are doing here too.