When you accidentally lose it (by losing your private keys), it will be impossible for anyone else to get it back for you. In a sense, this will prove to you that you did really own it and no-one else did.

It sounds like I don't own the domain, but whoever has the Keys does.

Imagine somebody suddenly "owns" my house because they pickpocketed my house keys, without any recurse. Then I really don't own the house, do I.

It's the closest concept we have to physical ownership in the digital realm.

But IMHO this is an unwanted effect that we should avoid

> How would the blockchain saying that you "own" a domain make you own it more than currently?

There would have to be consensus that the particular blockchain is the source of truth for who owns which domain.

> It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain.

Yes, and this is something that wouldn't be necessary with blockchain-based domain names. It would not need to know about anything that originates from the outside.

> This is the reason why wanting to apply blockchain to everything such as land ownership is laughable and shows how little blockchain fanatics understand about the very technology they praise.

I'm far from a blockchain fanatic and using blockchain for land ownership is obviously laughable to me.

> It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain

True, but instead of having to trust a central authority for insertion, updating, removal and constant maintenance of your "ownership", the trust would only be required for insertion. Once you purchased a domain and it's inserted in the blockchain, no one (outside of yourself) should be able to revoke, change or question your ownership of the domain itself.

Honestly it would be a pretty good use case for a blockchain, but it lacks a money incentive for any part involved so it will probably never happen

If you were an important, powerful or influential organisation, you could just get DNS servers, OSes and/or browsers to special-case a domain rather than refer to the blockchain. Unless you have a legal authority enforcing the rule that "what the blockchain says, goes".

So what happens when Microsoft disagrees that I own Microsoft.block?

E: Honest question, comes off as snark a little - would they be able to just take it somehow or would they need to use jailtime and or broken kneecaps to get it off you? Either way the blockchain's concept of ownership seems like it would be broken easily by law and companies with lots of money

They hardcode their IP into IE/Edge and Windows as the host for that domain, ignoring what the blockchain says.

Or more likely, in partnership with other big tech with similar concerns, they develop an infrastructure that permits blocking/revoking/overriding specific domains, that most clients would refer to in preference to the blockchain. This would be fairly easy to justify on grounds of security and crime.

Or they just don't support the blockchain stuff in the first place, because the current system mostly works and provides a legal process for disputes which they are content with.

> Or they just don't support the blockchain stuff in the first place

This is a given, it's strictly hypothetical.

> they develop an infrastructure that permits blocking/revoking/overriding specific domains, that most clients would refer to in preference to the blockchain

Luckily we already have something similar to fall back on already, that's a time saver!

Would this also handle domain expiry in some way?