I’m not a fan of Handshake. The auction system is pretty much the worst system you could build for normal (ie: not rich) businesses that want to register their own names. Seriously, who wants to compete against people who have a gazillion HNS that they got for free?

Then add in the fact that it’s a judgement proof blockchain and you’ve got a system that’s awesome for squatters, flippers, and rent seekers while being terrible for real businesses that want to build real value. How do I stop someone from typo squatting or violating my trademarks?

I’m always surprised by the number of people that want lawlessness.

Zooko's triangle implies that human-meaningful names will always be contended (to a varying extent) in a decentralized system. But you don't need human-meaningful names to host your services under, only to optionally direct users to them. So an auction system seems like it should be the most appropriate for such user-facing links. Individual users can always opt for some alternative means of indexing, e.g. "petnames" chosen locally or provided by some source that they trust.

> Zooko’s Triangle

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko's_triangle

I’ve lost auctions I’ve started by forgetting about it. I usually just hop on name base and send them an offer for the amount they bought it for. Usually they will sell it or be a dick and counter-offer a ridiculous sum.

I haven’t had any issue with it.

Yes.

Saw that on Solana and it sucks hard.

I know a bunch of people who lost their auctions to some grifters.

Interesting. However:

> Seriously, who wants to compete against people who have a gazillion HNS that they got for free?

Or you can buy it off of them, just like you do anywhere else if you were too late to buy say, pets.com, nba.eth or .ftx/ which were all 'squatted and flipped' today. No different here and neither system aimed to totally prevent squatters, flippers and rent seekers. Because you cannot and you know that.

> Then add in the fact that it’s a judgement proof blockchain and you’ve got a system that’s awesome for squatters, flippers, and rent seekers while being terrible for real businesses that want to build real value.

Are you going to say all of that to the Russian users on Namecheap who are getting their domains de-platformed? [0] Perhaps we loved .org getting into the hands of a private-equity firm didn't we? [1] or even the .io [2] and other TLDs price increases. [3]. All thanks to ICANN, right?

At least to some extent with either ENS or Handshake a registrar can't 'de-platform' the whole TLD nor can it be seized by anyone; nor can a government request to de-root an entire TLD. [4]

> How do I stop someone from typo squatting or violating my trademarks?

As I said before, nobody can stop that and anyone who has a popular online business knows that.

Even when you take them down, more typo squatters take its place. It happens everywhere. There will always be typo squatters even after trademark violations, unless you buy the domains off of them.

> I’m always surprised by the number of people that want lawlessness.

Lawlessness? I wonder how those 'criminals' can really cover their tracks by owning several domains on a public blockchain. /s

If you want true lawlessness, use Tor and scrambled .onion links followed by messaging apps like Signal with E2EE and sending private untraceable cryptocurrencies on encrypted blockchains like MobileCoin. It's what all the extremists and criminals use to fund their activities and lawlessness without a trace and no transparency.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29403773

[3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/ethos-capital-grabbing...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30509567

> As I said before, nobody can stop that and anyone who has a popular online business knows that.

> Even when you take them down, more typo squatters take its place. It happens everywhere. There will always be typo squatters even after trademark violations, unless you buy the domains off of them.

I disagree with almost everything you wrote, but especially this part. There's absolutely recourse in the current system. It roughly goes webhost > registrar > registry > ICANN. If someone is violating your trademark you can use ICANN's UDRP to file a complaint and ICANN has a process for resolving the dispute.

You can even see the market impact of the UDRP if you pay attention. $5k is often quoted as the rough cost to expect when making a UDRP complaint, so it's not a coincidence that most domainers (aka squatters) sell non-premium domains for $2k-4k.

At the very least the bad actor is going to have to reveal their identity to accept your money or to participate in the UDRP. That alone is enough to deter some of the most egregious behavior.

> Or you can buy it off of them, just like you do anywhere else

Domain squatting is a thing, is a problem, and it surprises me not at all that web3/crypto shills pretend it isn't.

There's a difference between pretending it doesn't exist, and acknowledging that it's inevitable (especially in a system where there's nobody who can unilaterally reassign other parties' domain names). What would your solution here be?

> There's a difference between pretending it doesn't exist

No one is pretending it doesn't exist

> and acknowledging that it's inevitable

What you and the sibling comment are proposing is bot acknowledging it, but making it the normal, and possibly only way to do it, and to incentivize people to do it.

It is already the norm with the current domain registration system, so I'm not sure what your point is. I recently tried to purchase a domain with some version of my name. There is nothing hosted there (domain name lookup fails). I offered them a few grand for it which I thought was reasonable, no response.

Would be interested in your solution to this problem if you have one (seriously, I don't know how to solve it).

I don't know what the solution is. But a "pay-to-win" scheme on an irreversible ledger isn't it.

Both current and blockchain solutions are pay to win in the exact same ways. The blockchain solution solves other problems.

If we agree that there's no known solution for the "pay to win" part, I'm not sure what your criticism of this even is?

> Both current and blockchain solutions are pay to win in the exact same ways

They don't.

> The blockchain solution solves other problems.

It doesn't. As in there are no problems blockchain solves, period, and it makes most existing problems worse.

> I'm not sure what your criticism of this even is

You want to normalise and incentivise the behaviour. And pretending that by simply appending "blockchain" to it it is okay.

Yup trustless naming would be even better, gave the example of ENS because it's popular.

My point is that we need adoption for decentralized naming, routing/locating, hosting/"pinning". Be it a combination of ENS/Handshake/IPFS/Sia/Filecoin/BitTorrent/Ethereum or any combination of stacks.