The DNS ROOT becomes controlled by the people instead of ICANN - it’s the end of ceased and censored domains.

Additionally, HNS also fixes the problems the CA system has today. CAs can generate certificates for any domain - even if the domain owner didn’t request it. This has led to countless occurrences of abuse.

> The DNS ROOT becomes controlled by the people instead of ICANN - it’s the end of ceased and censored domains.

Good luck with that. If there is no way to have a US court take ownership of a domain (or force someone to handover a bad faith registration), someone will either end up in jail for contempt, or it will just be banned.

> Additionally, HNS also fixes the problems the CA system has today. CAs can generate certificates for any domain - even if the domain owner didn’t request it. This has led to countless occurrences of abuse.

It fixes the non EV cert situation (kind of - CAA records also help this, and work on the standard internet), but doesn't fix EV certs (i.e. amzon.tld is actually Amazon LLC and not Scammers R Us Ltd.)

It also ignores the reality of most major companies in the world MITM'ing all outbound traffic from offices to ensure sensitive content is not exfilled from the company - there is 0 chance of them allowing traffic out that they could not MITM.

> Good luck with that. If there is no way to have a US court take ownership of a domain (or force someone to handover a bad faith registration), someone will either end up in jail for contempt, or it will just be banned.

This same argument applies to bitcoin and it has not (yet) been banned in much of the free world.

We don't see them trying to change anything on the chain with bitcoin - just trace people (and law enforcement has gotten pretty good at that to be fair). They seize wallets from people they arrest, like normal cash / assets, or get a court order to get companies holding the coin to hand them over, if the accused used a hosted wallet.

it would work exactly the same then: taking ownership of the handshake private key by which the registration means you control that name.

But you first have to figure out who to put in jail for contempt and in order to ban it you'll have to take down the entire block chain.

I'm not totally sure how this one works but with ENS there are key holders that theoretically have the ability to do operations on any entry but it takes a certain number of them to all coordinate and agree.

Right, so you threaten all of them with jail until they hand over the keys to a US Court to continue to do the takedowns for copyright enforcement / ISIS website / scam site pretending to be Amazon / the new Silk Road / $reason.

We have seen this before, where people who run these services are personally held in contempt until they comply with the order.

There are no "people who run these services" in the case of blockchain name resolution, though. There is (usually) a single person who possesses the private key necessary to update the records for a domain - if they find out who that is, they're welcome to use legal compulsion to force them to act.

* I say "usually" because more complex permissions schemes are possible with Bitcoin Script. m-of-n in particular I could see being very useful; it could allow individuals to update some parts of the record but not all - for instance, make it mathematically impossible to abandon the domain or move where it's pointed, but still possible to update contact information.

This is exactly the reason that peer-to-peer services never work. Tor, BitTorrent, cryptocurrency: Failures, all. Each of their users threatened individually by US law enforcement until the service died.

There’s no one to threaten. You may be able to find one or two people running the fullnode but it’d be immensely difficult to find everyone running a fullnode around the world and threaten them.

ENS has only 6 root key holders which not that many from a security perspective. Handshake has no root key holders — it’s secured by every fullnode supporting the blockchain. That’s what makes bitcoin so difficult to shut down.