The Handshake Naming System [1] provides a decentralized option, works directly with the existing legacy system so there will be 0 difficulty in the transition, and it’s usable right now [2]!
Just install hsd [3] and point your resolution to localhost to join the movement to an internet owned by the people.
This means that nobody will be able to charge you for using your own name. No more rent seeking or getting taxed by a pseudo government of the internet.
Given the conversation we had on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22312014, I think this claim is leaving out a lot of information. Handshake is not optimized for ordinary people to buy TLDs the same way they buy .com domains.
- There's no market information I can find about what a TLD will cost on average.
- Purchasing a TLD will take at least 5 days at a minimum, with no guarantee that you're going to get the TLD at the end.
- Auctions are blind, so you have almost no guarantees at all -- you'll just have to guess what the market value is.
- The intention is still for TLD owners to be able to sell access to subdomains, which will enable the exact same rent seeking and exploitation. The only difference is that there'll be no regulation on the rent seekers.
- Given that subdomains allow us to repeat names (myname.com vs myname.org vs myname.io), having one TLD system is going to be a decrease in the number of available domains, not an increase. The increase comes from the fact that we'll have a ton of TLDs and people will rent subdomains on them (see above).
That's not to say Handshake might not still be a good idea in the sense that it increases competition overall, but I think it's borderline deceptive to say that everyone is just going to own a TLD. Registering a TLD in Handshake may end up being significantly more complicated and significantly more costly than buying a .org domain today -- especially once the good names get used up and new users are effectively forced to rent from existing owners or compete in blind auctions over much more limited resources.
I'm a little bit irritated at this comment, because I've followed Handshake for a while and it's been really hard to get concise, clear information about how it works, even from the main project website. People don't understand the product being offered, and Handshake advocates keep posting very vague statements about how problems are just 'solved'. And whenever I dig into those claims and try to find out how they're solved, I find out that the implementation details aren't as clear cut.
I want a project like Handshake to succeed, but y'all need to be a lot more up-front about the tradeoffs.
1. I want a project like Handshake to be successful as well, and I agree it has a long way to go - the trade-offs are numerous, high-magnitue, and (sadly) opaque.
But also, 2. Having seen first-hand how these things take shape over long periods of time (the second decade of Bitcoin's existence is just getting started), Handshake needs help, is designed to be flexible, and you can help. In fact, I'd argue you already are helping, and in ways the average crypto-native community member trumpeting blind-eyed optimism - is not. :)
It’s significantly easier than the process is today. It’s very hard to get a TLD from ICANN as the process consists of a non refundable application fee of 185k with no guarantees you’ll be approved.
> There's no market information I can find about what a TLD will cost on average.
Rather than artificial set costs, the market will dictate this.
> The intention is still for TLD owners to be able to sell access to subdomains, which will enable the exact same rent seeking and exploitation.
People can either register their own TLDs or choose one owned by someone who doesn’t want to gouge people.
> Auctions are blind, so you have almost no guarantees at all -- you'll just have to guess what the market value is.
Yes, and every bidder will have to be serious about wanting to win a domain instead of squatting every last domain.
I appreciate your comments, and understand your concerns. I would be irritated too if I couldn’t find information about how this worked. Unfortunately, all the details (like Bitcoin was at the beginning) are buried in technical papers and developer docs. Luckily, Handshake is a community owned, community run project, and comments like yours help to propel the project forward and bring the explanation that people deserve.
Thank you for your help and questions, and please keep them coming!
But you're coming into this conversation claiming that Handshake is going to democratize TLDs, that anyone will be able to buy one. We don't really know that the average cost of a TLD won't spike up to a thousand dollars, right? We don't know that every fortune 500 company in the world and every government in the world won't step in and snatch up every auction that gets posted. By design, there's no way for us to stop them from doing that.
There are very plausible scenarios here where ordinary people will not be able to buy TLDs under Handshake. Meanwhile, the worst case pricing scenario for the .com domain market, even with all of the centralization problems, is that it ends up costing $10-20 more per year over the 5-10 years.
I'm not saying that there aren't advantages to letting the market decide, and I'm not saying that the worst-case scenario will necessarily happen. It might be great. But I am saying that people learning about Handshake for the first time are looking at it as a drop-in replacement for .com, and it's decidedly not. I'm skeptical anyone has any idea what price or availability is going to be.
> or choose one owned by someone who doesn’t want to gouge people.
Without protocol-level migration tools between TLDs this is still centralization. I'm still stuck relying on a rented product owned by a private individual that I can move away from.
Remember, when .com and .org came out, they were also owned by an organization that didn't want to gouge people.
The decentralization benefits of Handshake are entirely encapsulated in ordinary people owning their own TLDs. We really shouldn't be talking about rented subdomains at all, rented subdomains are the problem that Handshake was advertised as solving.
> Unfortunately, all the details (like Bitcoin was at the beginning) are buried in technical papers and developer docs.
For what it's worth, Handshake isn't the only project of its type that struggles with this. It was similarly difficult to find out how projects like IPFS really worked.
There is a scarcity of coins which will help to prevent this. Whenever you bid on a name, your coins are further locked up until the end of the auction.
> Remember, when .com and .org came out, they were also owned by an organization that didn't want to gouge people.
No I don’t remember this - it never happened. Quick history lesson: It was 50 dollars to get a .com or any name, and later 35 dollars. Network solutions had a monopoly on it.
> The decentralization benefits of Handshake are entirely encapsulated in ordinary people owning their own TLDs.
Absolutely! In addition, it serves to solve issues with the CA system. It democratizes ownership of the internet and makes it safer.
My view is that maturity of the project will bring some of the answers everyone is looking for.
As an anecdote, the first name auctions are actually ending in the next 48h.
Mean bids for early names (a few hundred) from the last time I looked in a cli were under 10 HNS, so under 5 USD at current prices. .coin for low thousands of USD. .11 for low hundreds of USD.
So that may give you a bit of an early view of what the prices are looking like. All subject to change of course because the auctions are not done yet.
For what it's worth, as someone enthusiastic about Handshake, crypto, and decentralized systems in general...I can totally empathize with the irritation you've expressed here. There's so much noise out there and 2017-2018 blockchain projects are notorious for over-promising on vague and impossible things, and then fading to nothing when the impossible things turn out to actually be impossible.
One thing I'd like to emphasize: Handshake's community may be what ends up being the differentiator against ICANN, less so anything financial or crypto related. I think that is what Rasengan is trying to accomplish here: build a true grassroots effort to work together to make Handshake a real contender. Because many of the readers here already have a piece of the network (majority of the coin supply being given not to investors, but Foss developers).
The simple notion that skilled, knowledgeable, opinionated, and generative individuals can have an outsized impact when raising concerns like this can be very powerful. Because it's an open network, many, many things are malleable, even economics/pricing/miner influence.
Decentralization has it's trade-offs. As Steve Waldman likes to say: "it's powerful at the edges, where Hayekian information flows can cover the blindspots of centralized efficiency".
https://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2019/02/tao-of-decentr...
I'm really glad that you said this. I was just all over the website and was feeling a little dumb because I was having trouble figuring out what this did in any sort of detail.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/265770/most-popular-us-w...
Using Alexa rank seems like a solution somebody with tunnel vision for the internet/tech industry would come up with. Volume of traffic isn't a good proxy for importance.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/registrars-raise...
The current ICANN system is essentially a monopoly that can raise prices to double revenue without paying mind to what the people of the internet have commented.
The problem with the current system isn't that there aren't enough TLDs. There are tons of TLDs. The problem is that once you register a domain, you need to have permanent ownership of that domain. It doesn't matter if there are 5 thousand (or even 5 million) TLDs. Once I link a .com domain to my email, the .com owner has a monopoly over me.
Handshake doesn't solve that problem. TLD owners will still be able to rent-seek, and they'll still hold monopolies over anyone who buys from them.
This statement is cryptographically false. Handshake does give ownership of names in the form of TLDs to people and therefore, the owner of said TLD will not be subject to rent from name ownership.
That being said, you are right that someone could still take a TLD and rent seek. Handshake benefits from not being monopolized in this process - you can always get your own TLD if you want to avoid this.
The moment I'm renting a subdomain under another person's TLD, the problem stops being solved.
> people will have alternatives to .org, should .org continue to do what the people don’t want.
Handshake does not address or solve the problem of domain migration in any way. If you rent a subdomain from a Handshake TLD owner, and they turn out to be evil, you are in the exact same position as you would be under a centralized system.
If you want to get rid of that problem, the TLD registration needs to be robust enough that everyone -- even high-school kids, even poor people, even weirdos who own dozens of websites -- can buy their own TLDs for all of them. The "you'll just rent subdomains" argument for Handshake needs to go away.
I agree. Luckily, projects and services meant to facilitate this have spawned in the community [1][2].
Definitely great questions and thoughts. Please keep them coming as we need to be hyper critical of this, as it’s the first time in mankind that an opportunity to be self governed in a system used by all people exists and has a real opportunity to succeed.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/registrars-raise...
* The .org owners should not be allowed to rent-seek, but instead continue to provide the same level of service and fees that we have come to expect.
* The control and governance of TLDs should be handled by a non-corrupt governing body with the powers to ensure that only well-behaved operators may control TLD domains (where "well-behaved" can mean "will not rent-seek").
* To enforce this in the face of corrupt actors, the governing body for TLDs needs to be able to take back control of a TLD from a corrupted operator.
You have not convinced me that Handshake will address any of these things. Therefore, Handshake is not germane to the discussion of what to do about .org.
When the centralized monopoly is all for raising prices, it becomes clear that market forces ceased to exist.
In free markets, pricing is controlled by the markets themselves, not by any single actor.
Handshake absolutely makes TLDs a free market.
> The control and governance of TLDs should be handled by a non-corrupt governing body with the powers to ensure that only well-behaved operators may control TLD domains (where "well-behaved" can mean "will not rent-seek").
I agree with this. Again, free markets control this. Consider the difference between the market for gum (market controlled) versus the market for patented drugs (single actor controlled).
> To enforce this in the face of corrupt actors, the governing body for TLDs needs to be able to take back control of a TLD from a corrupted operator.
If the community collectively decides to fork, it can fork.
The people hold the power.
Thanks for pointing out these questions and allowing me to directly address how Handshake solves these problems, and please keep them coming as it helps us to better understand what information isn’t well explained, and explain it!
> In free markets, pricing is controlled by the markets themselves, not by any single actor.
I want .org name prices to remain capped at $10, and I want its stewards to take steps to ensure that there isn't a profit motive. That's a big part of what this uproar is -- lots of cash-strapped organizations whose Web presence depends on .org continuing to be operated as it was would harmed even if the prices of .org names were set by an idealized free market. This is not something Handshake addresses.
> I agree with this. Again, free markets control this. Consider the difference between the market for gum (market controlled) versus the market for patented drugs (single actor controlled).
The "free-ness" of the market is orthogonal to the problem at hand. The problem here is corruption and rent-seeking. Handshake not only fails to address this, but also arguably makes it more prone to happen.
> If the community collectively decides to fork, it can fork.
If the problem was as easily solved as setting up and running an alternative DNS root, we wouldn't need Handshake. We'd just run an alternative DNS root, but with a governing charter that is less prone to corruption. No need to introduce a blockchain to solve a fundamentally social problem.
This approach would also be highly disruptive and would hurt a lot of people over the course of its execution. Why are you so adamantly opposed to simply stopping the sale of .org to rent-seekers? Stopping the sale is, by far, the least painful and least disruptive solution.
> Thanks for pointing out these questions and allowing me to directly address how Handshake solves these problems, and please keep them coming as it helps us to better understand what information isn’t well explained, and explain it!
Except, you haven't addressed a single one of my problems.
Actually, this is the problem. Cash-strapped organizations should not be forced to pay rent for something that should be owned by them, or the people or the internet at large.
This is something Handshake addresses.
> If the problem was as easily solved as setting up and running an alternative DNS root, we wouldn't need Handshake. We'd just run an alternative DNS root, but with a governing charter that is less prone to corruption. No need to introduce a blockchain to solve a fundamentally social problem.
"Less prone to corruption" is an interesting phrase. We've tried, and tried, throughout the history of mankind to create organizations that are "less prone to corruption." Ultimately, it's hard to solve if you choose to do it a social way.
Blockchain uniquely solves the issue here and, for the world, the way Handshake approaches the replacement of the root zone, will be the birth of the first time, in mankind, a actual system used by all people is powered, at the core (root), by blockchain.
There are a lot of made up problems that people are trying to solve with "blockchain" projects, and then there's Handshake, a consensus driven decentralized dns root and certificate authority, that helps the coordination of the internet namespace which isn't owned by any one person, but the collective of us all.
So Handshake does not permit name renewals? What happens, then, if some rich speculator just buys up all the rest of .org and rents them out at waaaay higher rates than $10/year? This is the problem we're dealing with right here -- ICANN permitting rent-seeking. Handshake certainly doesn't stop this; in fact, by design, it rejects the very idea that this could be a bad thing.
> "Less prone to corruption" is an interesting phrase. We've tried, and tried, throughout the history of mankind to create organizations that are "less prone to corruption." Ultimately, it's hard to solve if you choose to do it a social way.
So you're proposing that instead that DNS be governed by an unelected oligarchy of unaccountable miners? You'll have to forgive me if I'm not jumping for joy at the idea.
> Blockchain uniquely solves the issue here and, for the world, the way Handshake approaches the replacement of the root zone, will be the birth of the first time, in mankind, a actual system used by all people is powered, at the core (root), by blockchain.
You have already made it perfectly clear that you, personally, believe everyone would be better off if we all just surrendered DNS to an unelected oligarchy of unaccountable miners. You can spare me the blockchain woo-woo.
Please go back and read my comments on corruption and rent-seeking, since it does not appear that you read them. An unelected oligarchy of unaccountable miners is not going to solve this problem. A blockchain is not going to solve this problem. Technology is not going to solve this problem.
> There are a lot of made up problems that people are trying to solve with "blockchain" projects, ..
Sorry to interrupt this sentence, but Handshake is very much one of these solution-in-search-of-a-problem blockchain systems. We already have DNS. I'd rather we just stop the sale of .org and punish those responsible than destroy and re-implement a core piece of Internet infrastructure with blockchain woo-woo operated by an unelected oligarchy of unaccountable miners.
> and then there's Handshake, a consensus driven decentralized dns root and certificate authority, that helps the coordination of the internet namespace which isn't owned by any one person, but the collective of us all.
Calling it now: if deployed at scale in the absence of government oversight and regulation, Handshake will devolve into an unelected oligarchy of unaccountable miners, just like Bitcoin and Ethereum. I would bet all of my worldly possessions on it.
After all, if there exist a central authority, only that one authority being corrupt messes up everything.
On the other hand, a distributed scenario makes it more difficult for a handful of well-connected profit-motivated bad actors to corrupt the entire thing.
But a distributed set-up is more complex (and more expensive), that's for sure
if one rich actor can gobble up the small decentralized pieces then they have become a single centralized piece.
And then plug all of your devices into your router. Easy peasy, albeit not as easy as Comcast’s big bridge mode switch on the modem control panel.
But I would be surprised if the whole of the tech world can only think of two possible ways of managing it.