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So, silly question perhaps. I genuinely don’t know. Is blockchain handy for this decentralizing part of DNS or DNS entirely? Suppose a blockchain network, or n

So, silly question perhaps. I genuinely don’t know. Is blockchain handy for this decentralizing part of DNS or DNS entirely? Suppose a blockchain network, or networks, knows all the TLD server IPs (I don't have DNS sharp in my mind, sorry for that). You can transfer ownership of a domain to someone else. I think conceptually it’s an NFT right? Not that it is art, but domains aren’t fungible I think. So it is non-fungible. So you could wrap each non-fungible domain in a token on a network, making it an NFT. I wonder what the actual issues will be. Striving for a decentralized DNS with whatever technique one would use seems to be a good thing IMO. The internet is for us all. Edit: Ohhh this article is actually using a blockchain solution called namebase. When I was skimming, I saw IPFS so I thought somehow IPFS was used instead. That was more subtly interwoven in the story than I thought.

miohtama 5y ago
The most popular decentralised domain name system is ENS. While domains are not called NFTs (ENS predates the term) it functions more or less how you described. https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/
alfl 5y ago
Not a silly question, I think you've described Namecoin.
jonahbenton 5y ago
Conceptually, there is an important distinction between "mechanism" and "policy." There are many, many mechanisms for handling legal/technical control/ownership/system of record/etc. This is a problem with solutions that date to the beginning of civilization. Whether mechanism is pieces of paper in a vault or replicated records in different jurisdictions or hashes on blockchain matters only on the margins. Policy is the hard part. What happens when mechanism fails or when the parties relying on the mechanism have disagreements about the implications. When there is disagreement about which blockchain is authoritative. (Sometimes blockchain people call this "governance" and wish to solve it also with mechanism.) Anyway, there are good reasons for human organizations to act in a policy/governance capacity. One may think of any particular organization as flawed, which is no doubt true. But in any context where people depend on the mechanism working "correctly" people are the only participants who can provide that assurance.
arcticbull 5y ago
Of course it's not lol, like anything Blockchain it adds no value and makes everything it touches worse. If Apple loses their domain NFT should they what, just re-brand the business? There's a reason we have a chain of trust and authority leading all the way up to the supreme court and not just "yolo, SFYL." [edit] Like all the distributed identity plays, "not your keys, not your life" is such an asinine model to try and foist on people.
- mettamage 5y ago
  Well, I agree that we put our trust in technology an awful lot when we do this. But don't we put this trust into technology already? One obstacle you described seems to be very much alive in the blockchain world today which is: what if you lose your key? Who can you turn to? Solving this (somehow) might help us to a more decentralized internet.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    > But don't we put this trust into technology already? No, that's why we have courts as the ultimate arbiters. > One obstacle you described seems to be very much alive in the blockchain world today which is: what if you lose your key? Who can you turn to? Solving this (somehow) might help us to a more decentralized internet. Anything short of "not your keys not your life" is a centralization risk and quickly, at the limit, approaches exactly what we have right now but less efficient.
    - dumbfoundded 5y ago
      The courts present a large problem though. Most digital crimes happen across borders. Courts are pretty much useless for ransomware, identity theft, and everything else online when the criminals are in an inconvenient jurisdiction. Blockchain if anything shows the failure of our judicial system. Most of the cybercrimes are enabled by cryptocurrency and our justice system is hopeless to stop these payments.
      - 5y ago
evbots 5y ago
coinbase is to namebase as bitcoin is to handshake

miohtama 5y ago

The most popular decentralised domain name system is ENS. While domains are not called NFTs (ENS predates the term) it functions more or less how you described. https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/

alfl 5y ago

Not a silly question, I think you've described Namecoin.

jonahbenton 5y ago

Conceptually, there is an important distinction between "mechanism" and "policy." There are many, many mechanisms for handling legal/technical control/ownership/system of record/etc. This is a problem with solutions that date to the beginning of civilization. Whether mechanism is pieces of paper in a vault or replicated records in different jurisdictions or hashes on blockchain matters only on the margins. Policy is the hard part. What happens when mechanism fails or when the parties relying on the mechanism have disagreements about the implications. When there is disagreement about which blockchain is authoritative. (Sometimes blockchain people call this "governance" and wish to solve it also with mechanism.) Anyway, there are good reasons for human organizations to act in a policy/governance capacity. One may think of any particular organization as flawed, which is no doubt true. But in any context where people depend on the mechanism working "correctly" people are the only participants who can provide that assurance.

arcticbull 5y ago

Of course it's not lol, like anything Blockchain it adds no value and makes everything it touches worse. If Apple loses their domain NFT should they what, just re-brand the business? There's a reason we have a chain of trust and authority leading all the way up to the supreme court and not just "yolo, SFYL." [edit] Like all the distributed identity plays, "not your keys, not your life" is such an asinine model to try and foist on people.

mettamage 5y ago
Well, I agree that we put our trust in technology an awful lot when we do this. But don't we put this trust into technology already? One obstacle you described seems to be very much alive in the blockchain world today which is: what if you lose your key? Who can you turn to? Solving this (somehow) might help us to a more decentralized internet.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  > But don't we put this trust into technology already? No, that's why we have courts as the ultimate arbiters. > One obstacle you described seems to be very much alive in the blockchain world today which is: what if you lose your key? Who can you turn to? Solving this (somehow) might help us to a more decentralized internet. Anything short of "not your keys not your life" is a centralization risk and quickly, at the limit, approaches exactly what we have right now but less efficient.
  - dumbfoundded 5y ago
    The courts present a large problem though. Most digital crimes happen across borders. Courts are pretty much useless for ransomware, identity theft, and everything else online when the criminals are in an inconvenient jurisdiction. Blockchain if anything shows the failure of our judicial system. Most of the cybercrimes are enabled by cryptocurrency and our justice system is hopeless to stop these payments.
    - 5y ago

evbots 5y ago

coinbase is to namebase as bitcoin is to handshake