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If there is ONE thing that needs to be decentralized RTFN, it is DNS. It's taking time, but the thugs in charge in various countries are slowly coming to reali

If there is ONE thing that needs to be decentralized RTFN, it is DNS. It's taking time, but the thugs in charge in various countries are slowly coming to realize that the easiest place to apply censorship is DNS because of its antiquated design and pervasiveness. One: you should be able to freely choose or name-to-IP-translation provider. Two: modern DNS should run on top of a trustless blockchain infrastructure. Namecoin was a very nice initial attempt, it's really sad it never took off. [EDIT]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin

contravariant 2y ago
To some extent it is decentralized is it not? Other than a small list of who serves which TLD you should be able to find the canonical nameserver for any domain. It should be more normal for people to have a DNS running locally perhaps.
- sgjohnson 2y ago
  > To some extent it is decentralized is it not? No. Everything relies on the root servers, as recursive servers rely on them.
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    But you can run your own root servers.
    - sgjohnson 2y ago
      And what good does that do?
      - cryptonector 2y ago
        Prevents some MITM attacks. You can also run your own TLDs where the registries are public enough.
boredatoms 2y ago
You are already free to choose your name-to-ip provider - there are many DNS servers, you can even run your own
cryptonector 2y ago
We all want the same view of the Internet and the Domain Name System, do we not? If so then that entails centralized registries and registrars. Perhaps what you have in mind is that the registries should be published, including incremental updates, "on a blockchain" so that we can all run our own authoritative DNS root, TLD, and ccTLD servers. You don't need a blockchain for this unless you want people to be able to register domainnames without registrars to mediate the registrations. Disintermediation of domainname registration might be a worthy goal, and it would help people run their own servers if it meant that registries were public (i.e., iterable, including ownership metadata). But you know that's going to be hard for governments to accept that insist on knowing who the domainname owners/operators are. But you don't need this in order to be able to run your own DNS authoritatives to avoid censorship: if they are public (available for download) just download the various TLD zones and serve them to your devices! Or, if you don't care for us all to have the same view of the Internet, then.. well, I don't think that would be a good thing. You might send me a link that I can't resolve unless you tell me what DNS you're using so I can switch to it, but switching to it might break other things -- in the worst case you we might not even be able to communicate which DNSes to use in order be able to communicate! That would be terrible. So on the whole IMO we just have to have a centralized DNS and we can only hope to defeat the DNS censors by sidestepping the operators' servers that the censors will rely on -- you might as well just use a VPN. Oh, and of course you know that nation states won't allow operating systems to have DNS censorship bypass functionality pre-installed, so most users won't know how to do it and won't do it.

contravariant 2y ago

To some extent it is decentralized is it not? Other than a small list of who serves which TLD you should be able to find the canonical nameserver for any domain. It should be more normal for people to have a DNS running locally perhaps.

sgjohnson 2y ago
> To some extent it is decentralized is it not? No. Everything relies on the root servers, as recursive servers rely on them.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  But you can run your own root servers.
  - sgjohnson 2y ago
    And what good does that do?
    - cryptonector 2y ago
      Prevents some MITM attacks. You can also run your own TLDs where the registries are public enough.

boredatoms 2y ago

You are already free to choose your name-to-ip provider - there are many DNS servers, you can even run your own

cryptonector 2y ago

We all want the same view of the Internet and the Domain Name System, do we not? If so then that entails centralized registries and registrars. Perhaps what you have in mind is that the registries should be published, including incremental updates, "on a blockchain" so that we can all run our own authoritative DNS root, TLD, and ccTLD servers. You don't need a blockchain for this unless you want people to be able to register domainnames without registrars to mediate the registrations. Disintermediation of domainname registration might be a worthy goal, and it would help people run their own servers if it meant that registries were public (i.e., iterable, including ownership metadata). But you know that's going to be hard for governments to accept that insist on knowing who the domainname owners/operators are. But you don't need this in order to be able to run your own DNS authoritatives to avoid censorship: if they are public (available for download) just download the various TLD zones and serve them to your devices! Or, if you don't care for us all to have the same view of the Internet, then.. well, I don't think that would be a good thing. You might send me a link that I can't resolve unless you tell me what DNS you're using so I can switch to it, but switching to it might break other things -- in the worst case you we might not even be able to communicate which DNSes to use in order be able to communicate! That would be terrible. So on the whole IMO we just have to have a centralized DNS and we can only hope to defeat the DNS censors by sidestepping the operators' servers that the censors will rely on -- you might as well just use a VPN. Oh, and of course you know that nation states won't allow operating systems to have DNS censorship bypass functionality pre-installed, so most users won't know how to do it and won't do it.