3 ms·

Domains are a rare and expensive resource, that also happens to get hijacked by spammers all the time when somebody forgets to pay their bills. It's not even po

Domains are a rare and expensive resource, that also happens to get hijacked by spammers all the time when somebody forgets to pay their bills. It's not even possible to buy a domain permanently. Meanwhile if you stick to just a hostname portion of a domain, you at the whim of whoever owns the domain, which is exactly the problem that has plagued the Internet for all its existence. We should just stick to public keys and forget about the domain name system if we ever want to actually improve the situations instead of just reinventing Twitter and Facebook by another name. It's endlessly frustrating how long public keys have been around and how little use they still get. Finger crossed that Nostr gets some traction, since that so far sounds like the most sensible approach towards a social network that is under the controls of the users themselves and nobody else.

diggan 3y ago
> Domains are a rare and expensive resource, Compared to what? IPv4 addresses are more rare and more expensive, for comparison. Besides, public keys are great for uniqueness, and that they're relatively cheap, but that also means they're hard to remember (compared to domains) and they're easy for spammers to get. Basically, neither domains nor keys solve Zooko's Triangle by themselves, and probably the ideal solution uses both and more to enable something that is decentralized, easy to remember and also secure.
- grumbel 3y ago
  > but that also means they're hard to remember Nobody remembers domain names either, that's what we have search engines for. The point of public keys is that they give the user something they own completely themselves and that their peers can verify. All the human-readable stuff can be implemented on top of that, e.g. if you wanna use domain names, put the public key into your DNS record. But you aren't forced to use domain names, you can send your keys around by mail if you prefer or put them in your Instgram bio. The most important part here is that this works towards a "Web as data structure". Everything that is based around domain names will fall apart in a few months or years when those domain names expire, links go dead constantly. Everything that is build around crypto can last forever, as the storage location becomes irrelevant. We already saw the benefits of this approach back with Usenet, where large parts of it could be reconstructed from random backup tapes, since everything was held together by globally unique message ids. Usenet didn't use crypto for this, but just depended on users behaving nicely, so that approach wouldn't work today, but it could be replicated with public key crypto in a very similar and more robust way.
soap- 3y ago
Public keys are completely meaningless to an average user. They mean nothing and thus there's no reason to keep them consistent. Not to mention it's impossible to type or say them

diggan 3y ago

> Domains are a rare and expensive resource, Compared to what? IPv4 addresses are more rare and more expensive, for comparison. Besides, public keys are great for uniqueness, and that they're relatively cheap, but that also means they're hard to remember (compared to domains) and they're easy for spammers to get. Basically, neither domains nor keys solve Zooko's Triangle by themselves, and probably the ideal solution uses both and more to enable something that is decentralized, easy to remember and also secure.

grumbel 3y ago
> but that also means they're hard to remember Nobody remembers domain names either, that's what we have search engines for. The point of public keys is that they give the user something they own completely themselves and that their peers can verify. All the human-readable stuff can be implemented on top of that, e.g. if you wanna use domain names, put the public key into your DNS record. But you aren't forced to use domain names, you can send your keys around by mail if you prefer or put them in your Instgram bio. The most important part here is that this works towards a "Web as data structure". Everything that is based around domain names will fall apart in a few months or years when those domain names expire, links go dead constantly. Everything that is build around crypto can last forever, as the storage location becomes irrelevant. We already saw the benefits of this approach back with Usenet, where large parts of it could be reconstructed from random backup tapes, since everything was held together by globally unique message ids. Usenet didn't use crypto for this, but just depended on users behaving nicely, so that approach wouldn't work today, but it could be replicated with public key crypto in a very similar and more robust way.

soap- 3y ago

Public keys are completely meaningless to an average user. They mean nothing and thus there's no reason to keep them consistent. Not to mention it's impossible to type or say them