9 ms·

No, Ethereum Name Service is still a clown show

77 points by yanmaani 5y ago

jonathan-adly 5y ago
I went in expecting the typical half-baked web3 sucks arguments popular in HN. But this is actually good, nuanced stuff. You are 100% right. We need more of these specific critiques on web3 projects to separate the clowns from the scammers from the legit actors.
- yanmaani 5y ago
  Thank you!
- tata71 5y ago
  Clowns can be helped, maliciousness cannot.
- vmception 5y ago
  > We need more of these specific critiques on web3 projects to separate the clowns from the scammers from the legit actors. Pretty much everyone is going to flip from "I don't like this, there is no use because I haven't seen one, I wish it would go away" to "I don't like this, here is how I can improve it"
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    I welcome this flip! The former is exhausting. At least the latter offers some thought of how to improve things.
- raffy 5y ago
  > But this is actually good, nuanced stuff. What's good about it? Half the post is about Bitcoin. A large chunk is about the ENS token distribution. There's no link to any of the contracts or code. There's no comparison with existing providers and the trade-offs. There's no discussion on how DAOs are still very immature and evolving. There's no acknowledgement of how ENS has behaved since inception. Flash loan voting? Clueless.
  - yanmaani 5y ago
    > Half the post is about Bitcoin. Yes, because Bitcoin is an actually working, properly designed system used by people for real-world ends. > A large chunk is about the ENS token distribution That would be two lines just below "Which one is ENS?", plus the image text? > There's no link to any of the contracts or code. What is there you want me to link to, specifically? I mean, I suppose I could give a source for "they could crank up the fee for renewing only your name to $1,000,000,000, and then allocate it to whomever they please once it expires" if you insist. But this is not contentious, surely? Is there any specific contract or code you think the article would be improved by linking to? > There's no comparison with existing providers Unstoppable Domains is arguably even less serious, Handshake doesn't allow you to own domains at the second level but is otherwise solid, [project] is good but there is a conflict of interest associated with me promoting it, MoneroDNS and Emercoin seem all right but I haven't looked into them deeply. > the trade-offs The trade-offs only exist because ENS exists as a "crypto-asset," the governance of which has to be freely traded on the open market for the economic structure to work. If ENS wouldn't have the purpose of making a profit for the insiders, there wouldn't be any reason to make all of these strange trade-offs in the first place. When you sacrifice censorship-resistance and decentralization, what is it that you get in exchange? What are you trading it for? > There's no discussion on how DAOs are still very immature and evolving. How do you expect them to "evolve" in the future? Is there a specific issue that will be solved in a certain way, or is it like Proof of Stake, where "new developments" at an unspecified point in the future are supposed to fix all the problems, so you shouldn't ask too much tricky questions today? > There's no acknowledgement of how ENS has behaved since inception. Well, I note that ENS made direct lies about their decentralization status prior to November 10, 2021, I note that ENS publicly announced their intention to censor if required, and I note that a few hundred keyholders is better than seven. Is there something else you think I should acknowledge? > Flash loan voting? Clueless. Does ENS have some special precaution against this? Or is it simply outside of the threat model?
    - magicjosh 5y ago
      > What is there you want me to link to, specifically? I mean, I suppose I could give a source for "they could crank up the fee for renewing only your name to $1,000,000,000, and then allocate it to whomever they please once it expires" if you insist. But this is not contentious, surely? Is there any specific contract or code you think the article would be improved by linking to? I can imagine raising the price of renewal on a domain. But how would "they" control allocating the domain when it expires?
- bb88 5y ago
  > We need more of these specific critiques on web3 projects to separate the clowns from the scammers from the legit actors. Comments like that will kill web3 on it's own. No need for anti-web3 people to get involved.
- bcmillegan 5y ago
  Good thing the central claims of the blog post are false. I explained in my top level comment.
rvz 5y ago
This is 100% correct. From [0] as 'advertised': > Launch censorship-resistant decentralised websites with ENS. Upload your website to IPFS and access it with your ENS name. And from the evidence given here [1] and [2]: > It takes 4 out of 7 geeks to bypass the blockchain in case of emergency, court orders or kneecaps. Not even 7. What is the point of the multisig then? At least ICANN requires all keyholders, but this is less than the maximum holders to bypass the blockchain. > “Moving forward, we want to be as responsible as we can. This includes possibly seeking to register .ETH through the normal ICANN process” - note that the “normal ICANN process” for gTLD regitration requires compliance with trademark law. So ENS is not 'censorship resistant' and it is basically a blockchain version of GoDaddy selling .eth domains which you do not own and 'can' take your domain away (or redirect it) whenever they want. Sounds like decentra-lies all over again and foreshadowing the web3 delusion, unless they take away the 'censorship-resistant' and 'decentralised websites' claims in [0]. [0] https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ [1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/-9zBqWpvNBlekGotR211s1mf6tM/ https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/-9zBqWpvNBlekGot... [2] https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/why-ens-doesnt-create-more-tlds-responsible-citizenship-in-the-global-namespace-7e66658fe2b1 https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/why-ens-doesnt-...
- yanmaani 5y ago
  I mean, these days you have the DAO. So on the positive side, it's not 4 of 7 people anymore. But on the negative side, it's theoretically anyone, depending on how badly they messed up the code, concentration of ownership, and other economic/social factors. You also have the problems that it's all resolved through a centralized service, in practice. So if Infura gets a court order to NXDOMAIN thepiratebay.eth, that's pretty much good night.
  - coolspot 5y ago
    If you look at the DAO voting process, it’s same 4-7 people having majority of voting tokens.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
huksley 5y ago
It is broken because adding new name (just checked right now) costs too much in the gas fee (sometimes 160 USD sometimes more). see for yourself https://app.ens.domains/name/totallyrandom.eth/register https://app.ens.domains/name/totallyrandom.eth/register
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  0.002 ETH per year sounds reasonable. But then 0.1 ETH gas for each transaction is ridiculous. > Increase registration period to avoid paying gas every year. I shouldn't have to. When I use my credit card, VISA charges the merchant (which can be passed to me), yes, but not at 5000% of the purchase.
  - raffy 5y ago
    It's cheaper to pay for 2 years in 1 tx, than 1 year twice in 2x, because that's 2 vs 1 modifications to global state. The price of gas is not constant. Wait for lower demand.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- rabuse 5y ago
  Yeah, it's great wanting to move $1 worth of ERC20 tokens for $50. /s
- Tenoke 5y ago
  To be fair that's not too much in the novelty domain space. It's about what you'd pay for say .ai
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisco255 5y ago
  They're in the process of adding layer 2 support so that you'll be able to register on rollups without having to pay high gas. Should be 1/10th of the cost in gas or less after its implemented. In the meantime, I've generally spent about $60 or so on gas fees, and since it's $5 a year for the actual registration, I tend to offset the gas by registering for more years. If you spend $100 you get a domain for 8 years. That's as good as cheaper TLDs.
pphysch 5y ago
> [In Bitcoin] the power is moved from a monarch, a single point of failure, but it’s moved to nowhere. For example, who owns Bitcoin? Nobody! What? Ownership/power is distributed among all the miners, albeit a number much bigger than 7. It still exists and can (and will eventually) be consolidated by a majority cartel. The article is correct about ENS, but implying that N=1000000 power shares (approx # of Bitcoin mining individuals, likely trending down as mining margins decrease) is different than N=7 power shares (ENS sigs) in the realm of security guarantees is just smoke and mirrors. Neither system abolishes power nor is immune to manipulation.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  > Ownership, and power, is distributed among all the miners, albeit a number much bigger than 7. Not much bigger. Over the last month, 97% of blocks were mined by the top 10 mining pools. https://btc.com/stats/pool https://btc.com/stats/pool
- yanmaani 5y ago
  Even if you control 70% of hashrate, that doesn't mean you can just do anything. You still have to abide by the rules. You can't approve invalid transactions or directly steal people's money, only re-order past transactions. This is in contrast to ENS, where the equivalent of a 51% attack allows you to do just that - steal names, change registration parameters, basically anything. Furthermore, in PoW coins, 51% attacks are fleeting by nature - they usually only run for a short time. Compare this to ENS, where if you get 51% control once, you can give yourself 100% control for perpetuity, because you can execute arbitrary code on the smart contract.
  - jorvi 5y ago
    > Compare this to ENS, where if you get 51% control once, you can give yourself 100% control for perpetuity, because you can execute arbitrary code on the smart contract. Maybe I don't understand crypto well enough, but since everything is in a public ledger, can't 'everyone' just decide to go on a hard fork right before the moment the bad actor took control, thus de facto invalidating all transactions after that point? If that is true, in a way the power over a crypto resides in wherever (rather, whatever fork) the majority of users believes it resides.
chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
The author seems to be under the impression that changing from a 4-of-7 multisig to DAO control is not an improvement? > Indeed, as long as a proposal gains more than 50% of the votes with a 1% quorum, it can execute abitrary code on behalf of the DAO - even such code that will give anyone dictatorial control over it in perpetuity. Of course this is how it works. The DAO can do whatever it wants, and is controlled by the thousands of users who vote using their tokens. This is a huge improvement over a small multisig!
- yanmaani 5y ago
  It may very well be better in relative terms. After all, arsenic is clearly better for your health than strychnine. But neither is especially good, now is it?
- wmf 5y ago
  They said the DAO is an improvement, but it looks like the 11 core stakeholders effectively control the DAO. A contentious proposal could probably pass with only 6 votes. Over time those tokens may get spread among more holders.
  - numtel 5y ago
    Until there's a viable solution to 1-person, 1-vote for DAOs, this is going to be the case everywhere. Detailed in the "Who Watches the Watchmen" paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2020.590171/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2020.5901...
    - wmf 5y ago
      Nothing is forcing a DAO to give half the voting shares to insiders.
    - yanmaani 5y ago
      Why does this need a DAO? Why does someone have to "own" it? They could just have it be run by the smart contract without human intervention.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
yob22 5y ago
asojfdowgh 5y ago
> You “own” your domain, but you do not own your ownership of that domain. I was having trouble forming examples of why I felt it important to be able to have full participation (e.g. running a full node for a given thing, or whatever else) before I involved myself in a "decentralized" thing This is a well noted example of investigating how far someone can partake, and finding it woefully short, so thanks for this
carlosdp 5y ago
>ENS is not decentralized in the sense that there is binding, non-human, trustless enforcement of what you may consider to be desiderata, such as: > not seizing people’s names This is false. Before control over the ENS protocol was handed over to the DAO, they made it impossible for the controller of the protocol to revoke any ".eth" name.
- yanmaani 5y ago
  Of course, but what happens when they selectively raise the renewal fee for your domain to $500 quadrillion? (Also, what prevents them from changing the controller back, if they have 51%?)
  - wallacoloo 5y ago
    i haven’t kept up with ENS to this deal. they moved from a multisig to a DAO. as GP claims, they also restricted the set of actions available to governance before this move. on the face of it then, it doesn’t look unlikely that the DAO will vote to further restrict its own abilities as time goes on. this exact mechanism has been used to progressively decentralize other protocols, and as we see with other “governance tokens” (e.g. Uniswap — where IIRC governance can tweak like one single boolean parameter), massively restricting governance abilities doesn’t destroy the viability of the token (which is to say, it’s not clear to me in which direction the finance incentive — if any — points with regards to such “ungovernance”).
    - carlosdp 5y ago
      ^ this, except I'd add that as a large ENS delegate myself (as one of the founders of Metaphor), I and other large delegates don't factor in the price of the token into decisions. We never intend to sell $ENS, it's a public good, not a profit-generating protocol. Think of it like an on-chain B-corp. That said, if you really want to make sure you can't ever face the "egregious renewal fee" attack vector, you could just register it for a really long time. For most names, it costs like $500 to register it for 100 years.
  - chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
DennisP 5y ago
> ensuring that insiders don’t get to register names for free (since the fees go back to them) Burning the fees would fix this. For something intended to be standard infrastructure, and whose ongoing costs are paid by the users, it'd be kinda nice if it were like that anyway.
bcmillegan 5y ago
The central criticism of ENS in this blog post - that the multisig (in the past) or the DAO (now) could take away your .ETH name - is not true. No one has the ability to take a .ETH name away from someone. The DAO (which launched Nov 8, not Nov 10 as it said), wasn't created to take over that power from the multisig because the multisig didn't have that power either. The multisig does manage the ENS root, but the .ETH TLD is permanently locked. Re the fact the DAO controls the pricing and registration parameters of .ETH names, it's true that it would be possible for the DAO to change them to something that targets a specific user or name. The DAO cannot take away a .eth name that is registered (it could only make it difficult or practically impossible to extend or register anew). To guard against this, a user can pay ahead for as many years as they want, ensuring they have the name for that period (e.g. 100 years). Given that DAO proposals have required voting periods, it wouldn't be possible to surprise this on someone, and they'd be able to simply extend their registration for 100 years (or whatever period they want) before it went through. As you mention, the ENS constitution also prohibits it. I find this attack vector extremely unlikely to be attempted and near impossible to carry out successfully. There's more I could say, but I think these were two main points.
- yanmaani 5y ago
  I responded to this by e-mail, but I'll put it here as well: > The central criticism of ENS in this blog post - that the multisig (in the past) or the DAO (now) could take away your .ETH name - is not true. No one has the ability to take a .ETH name away from someone. The DAO (which launched Nov 8, not Nov 10 as it said), wasn't created to take over that power from the multisig because the multisig didn't have that power either. The multisig does manage the ENS root, but the .ETH TLD is permanently locked. But I do not, in fact, state this: "ENS is censorship-resistant in the sense that nobody can directly seize your domain." > Re the fact the DAO controls the pricing and registration parameters of .ETH names, it's true that it would be possible for the DAO to change them to something that targets a specific user or name. The DAO cannot take away a .eth name that is registered (it could only make it difficult or practically impossible to extend or register anew). Now see, I would personally contend that "mak[ing] it difficult or practically impossible to extend or register" is a form of censorship. > To guard against this, a user can pay ahead for as many years as they want, ensuring they have the name for that period (e.g. 100 years). Well, if you assume that the registration fee never is increased above $5, sure. This also raises the question of why to even bother with expiration at all, other than as an opportunity to extract more rent. Likewise, if people will just go out and buy the names for two thousand years whenever the renewal fees go up, this raises the question of why you would even bother and not just grandfather the old names in. (I mean, I suppose for throwaway names or trivial fee hikes, but it's not entirely obvious) And I can still see some attacks about that business. For example, you start off by raising the fee to $6. Assuming this doesn't trigger them to buy it for 100 years, you raise it to $7, and so on. By the time the fee has reached let's say $100 p.a., hedging for 100 years would cost $10k, which is not exactly pocket money. And at that point, you can raise it even higher, etc. Also, on an aesthetic note, having to register names for 100 years because the renewal can be pulled out from under your feet at any time seems like somewhat of a kludge. (All this assumes nothing gets migrated, as happened in <https://docs.ens.domains/ens-migration-february-2020/technical-description https://docs.ens.domains/ens-migration-february-2020/technic...>. Based on the high degree of centralization inherent to ENS, my money is on this being an easier process than it ought to be.) > Given that DAO proposals have required voting periods, it wouldn't be possible to surprise this on someone, and they'd be able to simply extend their registration for 100 years (or whatever period they want) before it went through. If I'm reading this right, the voting period is either 9 or 14 days: https://docs.ens.domains/v/governance/process https://docs.ens.domains/v/governance/process Are you suggesting people keep a close eye on the voting process of the infrastructure that controls their domain? If so, would you say that them feeling necessitated to do so indicates confidence in this infrastructure? > As you mention, the ENS constitution also prohibits it. Ah yes, but does it prevent it? > I find this attack vector extremely unlikely to be attempted and near impossible to carry out successfully. Well, a lot of people thought it would be unlikely for Ethereum to pull of a hardfork to override the steadfast iron will of unstoppable code, but here we are. In the end, it's not about what you think, but about what actually happens. What happens when someone registers and actually starts using dailystormer.eth, causing a rash of bad headlines and the token price to drop precipitously? In the end, there's only one way to find out: Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.
magicjosh 5y ago
What to like about the piece: 1. Author likes some cryptocurrencies and so takes on this single project with that lens rather than dismissive of all crypto 2. Links to some sources 3. Disclosure about financial interests at the top 4. These are valid concerns around censorship. I believe the ENS creators have thought about these but still when someone starts registering offensive names that will be the true test, or using ENS to point to scihub or something. What to improve: 1. Seems like a long winded way to say "ENS isn't decentralized like Uniswap but it would be better if it was" 2. Title is overly clickbaity. Doesn't deliver. ENS team works hard from what I can tell. There's room for criticism but "clowns" is out of place. 3. Some of the exploits seems like they could be explained better. "3 ways to take down ENS are:". It's basically a penetration testing style analysis. But since you don't go to that level of depth it just comes across a bit sloppy. Overall, better than 95% of the cryptocurrency content out there, unfortunately.

77 points by yanmaani 5y ago

I went in expecting the typical half-baked web3 sucks arguments popular in HN. But this is actually good, nuanced stuff. You are 100% right. We need more of these specific critiques on web3 projects to separate the clowns from the scammers from the legit actors.

yanmaani 5y ago
Thank you!
tata71 5y ago
Clowns can be helped, maliciousness cannot.
vmception 5y ago
> We need more of these specific critiques on web3 projects to separate the clowns from the scammers from the legit actors. Pretty much everyone is going to flip from "I don't like this, there is no use because I haven't seen one, I wish it would go away" to "I don't like this, here is how I can improve it"
- magicjosh 5y ago
  I welcome this flip! The former is exhausting. At least the latter offers some thought of how to improve things.
raffy 5y ago
> But this is actually good, nuanced stuff. What's good about it? Half the post is about Bitcoin. A large chunk is about the ENS token distribution. There's no link to any of the contracts or code. There's no comparison with existing providers and the trade-offs. There's no discussion on how DAOs are still very immature and evolving. There's no acknowledgement of how ENS has behaved since inception. Flash loan voting? Clueless.
- yanmaani 5y ago
  > Half the post is about Bitcoin. Yes, because Bitcoin is an actually working, properly designed system used by people for real-world ends. > A large chunk is about the ENS token distribution That would be two lines just below "Which one is ENS?", plus the image text? > There's no link to any of the contracts or code. What is there you want me to link to, specifically? I mean, I suppose I could give a source for "they could crank up the fee for renewing only your name to $1,000,000,000, and then allocate it to whomever they please once it expires" if you insist. But this is not contentious, surely? Is there any specific contract or code you think the article would be improved by linking to? > There's no comparison with existing providers Unstoppable Domains is arguably even less serious, Handshake doesn't allow you to own domains at the second level but is otherwise solid, [project] is good but there is a conflict of interest associated with me promoting it, MoneroDNS and Emercoin seem all right but I haven't looked into them deeply. > the trade-offs The trade-offs only exist because ENS exists as a "crypto-asset," the governance of which has to be freely traded on the open market for the economic structure to work. If ENS wouldn't have the purpose of making a profit for the insiders, there wouldn't be any reason to make all of these strange trade-offs in the first place. When you sacrifice censorship-resistance and decentralization, what is it that you get in exchange? What are you trading it for? > There's no discussion on how DAOs are still very immature and evolving. How do you expect them to "evolve" in the future? Is there a specific issue that will be solved in a certain way, or is it like Proof of Stake, where "new developments" at an unspecified point in the future are supposed to fix all the problems, so you shouldn't ask too much tricky questions today? > There's no acknowledgement of how ENS has behaved since inception. Well, I note that ENS made direct lies about their decentralization status prior to November 10, 2021, I note that ENS publicly announced their intention to censor if required, and I note that a few hundred keyholders is better than seven. Is there something else you think I should acknowledge? > Flash loan voting? Clueless. Does ENS have some special precaution against this? Or is it simply outside of the threat model?
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    > What is there you want me to link to, specifically? I mean, I suppose I could give a source for "they could crank up the fee for renewing only your name to $1,000,000,000, and then allocate it to whomever they please once it expires" if you insist. But this is not contentious, surely? Is there any specific contract or code you think the article would be improved by linking to? I can imagine raising the price of renewal on a domain. But how would "they" control allocating the domain when it expires?
bb88 5y ago
> We need more of these specific critiques on web3 projects to separate the clowns from the scammers from the legit actors. Comments like that will kill web3 on it's own. No need for anti-web3 people to get involved.
bcmillegan 5y ago
Good thing the central claims of the blog post are false. I explained in my top level comment.

rvz 5y ago

This is 100% correct. From [0] as 'advertised': > Launch censorship-resistant decentralised websites with ENS. Upload your website to IPFS and access it with your ENS name. And from the evidence given here [1] and [2]: > It takes 4 out of 7 geeks to bypass the blockchain in case of emergency, court orders or kneecaps. Not even 7. What is the point of the multisig then? At least ICANN requires all keyholders, but this is less than the maximum holders to bypass the blockchain. > “Moving forward, we want to be as responsible as we can. This includes possibly seeking to register .ETH through the normal ICANN process” - note that the “normal ICANN process” for gTLD regitration requires compliance with trademark law. So ENS is not 'censorship resistant' and it is basically a blockchain version of GoDaddy selling .eth domains which you do not own and 'can' take your domain away (or redirect it) whenever they want. Sounds like decentra-lies all over again and foreshadowing the web3 delusion, unless they take away the 'censorship-resistant' and 'decentralised websites' claims in [0]. [0] https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ [1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/-9zBqWpvNBlekGotR211s1mf6tM/ https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/-9zBqWpvNBlekGot... [2] https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/why-ens-doesnt-create-more-tlds-responsible-citizenship-in-the-global-namespace-7e66658fe2b1 https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/why-ens-doesnt-...

yanmaani 5y ago
I mean, these days you have the DAO. So on the positive side, it's not 4 of 7 people anymore. But on the negative side, it's theoretically anyone, depending on how badly they messed up the code, concentration of ownership, and other economic/social factors. You also have the problems that it's all resolved through a centralized service, in practice. So if Infura gets a court order to NXDOMAIN thepiratebay.eth, that's pretty much good night.
- coolspot 5y ago
  If you look at the DAO voting process, it’s same 4-7 people having majority of voting tokens.
  - chrisco255 5y ago

huksley 5y ago

It is broken because adding new name (just checked right now) costs too much in the gas fee (sometimes 160 USD sometimes more). see for yourself https://app.ens.domains/name/totallyrandom.eth/register https://app.ens.domains/name/totallyrandom.eth/register

colejohnson66 5y ago
0.002 ETH per year sounds reasonable. But then 0.1 ETH gas for each transaction is ridiculous. > Increase registration period to avoid paying gas every year. I shouldn't have to. When I use my credit card, VISA charges the merchant (which can be passed to me), yes, but not at 5000% of the purchase.
- raffy 5y ago
  It's cheaper to pay for 2 years in 1 tx, than 1 year twice in 2x, because that's 2 vs 1 modifications to global state. The price of gas is not constant. Wait for lower demand.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
rabuse 5y ago
Yeah, it's great wanting to move $1 worth of ERC20 tokens for $50. /s
Tenoke 5y ago
To be fair that's not too much in the novelty domain space. It's about what you'd pay for say .ai
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
chrisco255 5y ago
They're in the process of adding layer 2 support so that you'll be able to register on rollups without having to pay high gas. Should be 1/10th of the cost in gas or less after its implemented. In the meantime, I've generally spent about $60 or so on gas fees, and since it's $5 a year for the actual registration, I tend to offset the gas by registering for more years. If you spend $100 you get a domain for 8 years. That's as good as cheaper TLDs.

pphysch 5y ago

> [In Bitcoin] the power is moved from a monarch, a single point of failure, but it’s moved to nowhere. For example, who owns Bitcoin? Nobody! What? Ownership/power is distributed among all the miners, albeit a number much bigger than 7. It still exists and can (and will eventually) be consolidated by a majority cartel. The article is correct about ENS, but implying that N=1000000 power shares (approx # of Bitcoin mining individuals, likely trending down as mining margins decrease) is different than N=7 power shares (ENS sigs) in the realm of security guarantees is just smoke and mirrors. Neither system abolishes power nor is immune to manipulation.

duskwuff 5y ago
> Ownership, and power, is distributed among all the miners, albeit a number much bigger than 7. Not much bigger. Over the last month, 97% of blocks were mined by the top 10 mining pools. https://btc.com/stats/pool https://btc.com/stats/pool
yanmaani 5y ago
Even if you control 70% of hashrate, that doesn't mean you can just do anything. You still have to abide by the rules. You can't approve invalid transactions or directly steal people's money, only re-order past transactions. This is in contrast to ENS, where the equivalent of a 51% attack allows you to do just that - steal names, change registration parameters, basically anything. Furthermore, in PoW coins, 51% attacks are fleeting by nature - they usually only run for a short time. Compare this to ENS, where if you get 51% control once, you can give yourself 100% control for perpetuity, because you can execute arbitrary code on the smart contract.
- jorvi 5y ago
  > Compare this to ENS, where if you get 51% control once, you can give yourself 100% control for perpetuity, because you can execute arbitrary code on the smart contract. Maybe I don't understand crypto well enough, but since everything is in a public ledger, can't 'everyone' just decide to go on a hard fork right before the moment the bad actor took control, thus de facto invalidating all transactions after that point? If that is true, in a way the power over a crypto resides in wherever (rather, whatever fork) the majority of users believes it resides.

chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago

The author seems to be under the impression that changing from a 4-of-7 multisig to DAO control is not an improvement? > Indeed, as long as a proposal gains more than 50% of the votes with a 1% quorum, it can execute abitrary code on behalf of the DAO - even such code that will give anyone dictatorial control over it in perpetuity. Of course this is how it works. The DAO can do whatever it wants, and is controlled by the thousands of users who vote using their tokens. This is a huge improvement over a small multisig!

yanmaani 5y ago
It may very well be better in relative terms. After all, arsenic is clearly better for your health than strychnine. But neither is especially good, now is it?
wmf 5y ago
They said the DAO is an improvement, but it looks like the 11 core stakeholders effectively control the DAO. A contentious proposal could probably pass with only 6 votes. Over time those tokens may get spread among more holders.
- numtel 5y ago
  Until there's a viable solution to 1-person, 1-vote for DAOs, this is going to be the case everywhere. Detailed in the "Who Watches the Watchmen" paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2020.590171/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2020.5901...
  - wmf 5y ago
    Nothing is forcing a DAO to give half the voting shares to insiders.
  - yanmaani 5y ago
    Why does this need a DAO? Why does someone have to "own" it? They could just have it be run by the smart contract without human intervention.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

yob22 5y ago

asojfdowgh 5y ago

> You “own” your domain, but you do not own your ownership of that domain. I was having trouble forming examples of why I felt it important to be able to have full participation (e.g. running a full node for a given thing, or whatever else) before I involved myself in a "decentralized" thing This is a well noted example of investigating how far someone can partake, and finding it woefully short, so thanks for this

carlosdp 5y ago

>ENS is not decentralized in the sense that there is binding, non-human, trustless enforcement of what you may consider to be desiderata, such as: > not seizing people’s names This is false. Before control over the ENS protocol was handed over to the DAO, they made it impossible for the controller of the protocol to revoke any ".eth" name.

yanmaani 5y ago
Of course, but what happens when they selectively raise the renewal fee for your domain to $500 quadrillion? (Also, what prevents them from changing the controller back, if they have 51%?)
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  i haven’t kept up with ENS to this deal. they moved from a multisig to a DAO. as GP claims, they also restricted the set of actions available to governance before this move. on the face of it then, it doesn’t look unlikely that the DAO will vote to further restrict its own abilities as time goes on. this exact mechanism has been used to progressively decentralize other protocols, and as we see with other “governance tokens” (e.g. Uniswap — where IIRC governance can tweak like one single boolean parameter), massively restricting governance abilities doesn’t destroy the viability of the token (which is to say, it’s not clear to me in which direction the finance incentive — if any — points with regards to such “ungovernance”).
  - carlosdp 5y ago
    ^ this, except I'd add that as a large ENS delegate myself (as one of the founders of Metaphor), I and other large delegates don't factor in the price of the token into decisions. We never intend to sell $ENS, it's a public good, not a profit-generating protocol. Think of it like an on-chain B-corp. That said, if you really want to make sure you can't ever face the "egregious renewal fee" attack vector, you could just register it for a really long time. For most names, it costs like $500 to register it for 100 years.
- chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago

DennisP 5y ago

> ensuring that insiders don’t get to register names for free (since the fees go back to them) Burning the fees would fix this. For something intended to be standard infrastructure, and whose ongoing costs are paid by the users, it'd be kinda nice if it were like that anyway.

bcmillegan 5y ago

The central criticism of ENS in this blog post - that the multisig (in the past) or the DAO (now) could take away your .ETH name - is not true. No one has the ability to take a .ETH name away from someone. The DAO (which launched Nov 8, not Nov 10 as it said), wasn't created to take over that power from the multisig because the multisig didn't have that power either. The multisig does manage the ENS root, but the .ETH TLD is permanently locked. Re the fact the DAO controls the pricing and registration parameters of .ETH names, it's true that it would be possible for the DAO to change them to something that targets a specific user or name. The DAO cannot take away a .eth name that is registered (it could only make it difficult or practically impossible to extend or register anew). To guard against this, a user can pay ahead for as many years as they want, ensuring they have the name for that period (e.g. 100 years). Given that DAO proposals have required voting periods, it wouldn't be possible to surprise this on someone, and they'd be able to simply extend their registration for 100 years (or whatever period they want) before it went through. As you mention, the ENS constitution also prohibits it. I find this attack vector extremely unlikely to be attempted and near impossible to carry out successfully. There's more I could say, but I think these were two main points.

yanmaani 5y ago
I responded to this by e-mail, but I'll put it here as well: > The central criticism of ENS in this blog post - that the multisig (in the past) or the DAO (now) could take away your .ETH name - is not true. No one has the ability to take a .ETH name away from someone. The DAO (which launched Nov 8, not Nov 10 as it said), wasn't created to take over that power from the multisig because the multisig didn't have that power either. The multisig does manage the ENS root, but the .ETH TLD is permanently locked. But I do not, in fact, state this: "ENS is censorship-resistant in the sense that nobody can directly seize your domain." > Re the fact the DAO controls the pricing and registration parameters of .ETH names, it's true that it would be possible for the DAO to change them to something that targets a specific user or name. The DAO cannot take away a .eth name that is registered (it could only make it difficult or practically impossible to extend or register anew). Now see, I would personally contend that "mak[ing] it difficult or practically impossible to extend or register" is a form of censorship. > To guard against this, a user can pay ahead for as many years as they want, ensuring they have the name for that period (e.g. 100 years). Well, if you assume that the registration fee never is increased above $5, sure. This also raises the question of why to even bother with expiration at all, other than as an opportunity to extract more rent. Likewise, if people will just go out and buy the names for two thousand years whenever the renewal fees go up, this raises the question of why you would even bother and not just grandfather the old names in. (I mean, I suppose for throwaway names or trivial fee hikes, but it's not entirely obvious) And I can still see some attacks about that business. For example, you start off by raising the fee to $6. Assuming this doesn't trigger them to buy it for 100 years, you raise it to $7, and so on. By the time the fee has reached let's say $100 p.a., hedging for 100 years would cost $10k, which is not exactly pocket money. And at that point, you can raise it even higher, etc. Also, on an aesthetic note, having to register names for 100 years because the renewal can be pulled out from under your feet at any time seems like somewhat of a kludge. (All this assumes nothing gets migrated, as happened in <https://docs.ens.domains/ens-migration-february-2020/technical-description https://docs.ens.domains/ens-migration-february-2020/technic...>. Based on the high degree of centralization inherent to ENS, my money is on this being an easier process than it ought to be.) > Given that DAO proposals have required voting periods, it wouldn't be possible to surprise this on someone, and they'd be able to simply extend their registration for 100 years (or whatever period they want) before it went through. If I'm reading this right, the voting period is either 9 or 14 days: https://docs.ens.domains/v/governance/process https://docs.ens.domains/v/governance/process Are you suggesting people keep a close eye on the voting process of the infrastructure that controls their domain? If so, would you say that them feeling necessitated to do so indicates confidence in this infrastructure? > As you mention, the ENS constitution also prohibits it. Ah yes, but does it prevent it? > I find this attack vector extremely unlikely to be attempted and near impossible to carry out successfully. Well, a lot of people thought it would be unlikely for Ethereum to pull of a hardfork to override the steadfast iron will of unstoppable code, but here we are. In the end, it's not about what you think, but about what actually happens. What happens when someone registers and actually starts using dailystormer.eth, causing a rash of bad headlines and the token price to drop precipitously? In the end, there's only one way to find out: Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.

magicjosh 5y ago

What to like about the piece: 1. Author likes some cryptocurrencies and so takes on this single project with that lens rather than dismissive of all crypto 2. Links to some sources 3. Disclosure about financial interests at the top 4. These are valid concerns around censorship. I believe the ENS creators have thought about these but still when someone starts registering offensive names that will be the true test, or using ENS to point to scihub or something. What to improve: 1. Seems like a long winded way to say "ENS isn't decentralized like Uniswap but it would be better if it was" 2. Title is overly clickbaity. Doesn't deliver. ENS team works hard from what I can tell. There's room for criticism but "clowns" is out of place. 3. Some of the exploits seems like they could be explained better. "3 ways to take down ENS are:". It's basically a penetration testing style analysis. But since you don't go to that level of depth it just comes across a bit sloppy. Overall, better than 95% of the cryptocurrency content out there, unfortunately.