Users should get to explicitly decide for themselves who owns what domain, or delegate that power to a trusted authority to decide for them. GNS enables this behavior.
I think namespacing is a rather poor use-case of this type of consensus.
It's an unpopular opinion because it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Here, let's go through it piece by piece:
>A major problem when designing a decentralized naming system, or any naming system at all really, is preventing malicious users from grabbing all the cool names for themselves.
This has nothing to do with malicious users. Any system that allows users to exclusively claim names permanently (or semi-permanently) will have this problem. Even if you invented a way to define and eject all malicious users out of DNS, domain names like facebook.com and youtube.com would still be highly contended and expensive, because of the inherent demand of those names in the current market.
>The only way to do this is to make acquiring domains costly
No, that wouldn't exclude malicious customers, it would only exclude customers who don't have a lot of money. You'd just select for the customers who are both malicious and wealthy.
>and blockchains are a perfect way to enforce that in a decentralized manner.
In practice, blockchains aren't decentralized at all. This much was obvious to anyone involved, since the first bitcoin mining pool formed in 2010. By making the system costly to join, you're only accelerating the process of centralization.
>Other problems include accurately tracking domain ownership and letting the owners transfer domains to others, which cryptocurrencies have solved long ago.
Cryptocurrencies didn't solve this and never will. A blockchain isn't legally binding, so tracking ownership just can't be done there. At best, you can have something that's an approximation of ownership, but still requires a trusted authority (i.e. an oracle) to make the final say on what the ownership actually is.
>As an added benefit, because all domains in such a system are owned by a public key, we suddenly no longer need a root of trust for TLS, instead, we accept any TLS certificate signed by that public key.
This is just shifting the problem. Now instead of worrying about trusting the root, you have to worry about trusting every single key out there, and make an individual decision for each of them.
If domains cost $0, claiming all potentially useful names for yourself costs x*0=$0. Someone will inevitably do that, making them the exclusive owner of almost all domains you could ever want to buy. As a consequence, 99% of potential future domains would be owned by malicious actors, who could charge astronomical prices for them. In other words, if you make domains free, somebody will snatch them all up and sell them for a lot of money.
If you need to make a payment to get or renew a domain, such an attack becomes far more costly. Getting the first 100 English words is probably worth it, getting a combination of all possible names and surnames probably isn't, unlike in the free version. That way, you can still find interesting domains that you actually need for low dollar amounts.
> In practice, blockchains aren't decentralized at all. This much was obvious to anyone involved, since the first bitcoin mining pool formed in 2010. By making the system costly to join, you're only accelerating the process of centralization.
Even if you can make a 51% attack, the security of the system isn't compromised. Sure, you can prevent domain registrations, transfers and updates for a while, maybe even reverse transactions done in the last few blocks, but you still can't take over anybody's domain without having their private key.
> Cryptocurrencies didn't solve this and never will. A blockchain isn't legally binding, so tracking ownership just can't be done there. At best, you can have something that's an approximation of ownership, but still requires a trusted authority (i.e. an oracle) to make the final say on what the ownership actually is.
You don't care about ownership in the legal sense, all you care about is that if Mark Zuckerberg owns the private key for Facebook.com today, nobody can do anything to Facebook.com tomorrow without his consent.
> This is just shifting the problem. Now instead of worrying about trusting the root, you have to worry about trusting every single key out there, and make an individual decision for each of them.
All TLS really guarantees is that the server you're contacting is trusted by the owner of the domain you typed in. In the current system, you need a root of trust to accomplish that, blockchains give you that property for free.
Some reasonable measures:
1. the organization could be a non-profit co-operative owned individually by its investors 2. the organization could establish a contract that enforces desired behaviour of participants by the judicial system
Voila, no blockchain needed.
The allure of a supranational DHT network is that it is more censorship-resistant, requiring deep packet inspection or attacks to block certain lookups.
I think this hypothetical consensus-based DNS blockchain sounds nice at first glance, but really, it just means that DNS is changed from an authority-based model to a consensus-based one. But consensus of what? It's not of people, but of resources -- compute power -- which states will always have more of, anyway. Like TOR, it just means the state has to control/surveil more "trusted" nodes. So it doesn't really solve anything.
You can't "web of trust" a global network of 8 billion people who don't have any interest in this stuff, don't want to peg their individual identities to some online system, and don't agree on what truth is to begin with. You can't techno-topia your way out of the cultural differences inherent in geopolitical disagreements.
Too true.
Computers won't "solve" social/political/cultural issues. They're reflections of the creators' politics. Even blockchains that purport to be egalitarian reflect the political ideology of their creators -- often naive at best or tyrannical themselves at worst.
If a blockchain became the norm, there would be no way for the state to have more compute power than the rest of the population
There is no way the government has enough servers and computers to come even close to 51% of the world's compute. And if they tried to print money and buy it all, it would be seen as ridiculous and the government would be sacked.
Also, surveilling TOR exit nodes is very different from owning over 51% of all TOR relays. The former won't help you deanonymize users, the latter most definitely will
And as and user who does not understand, nor have the resources to meaningfully inspect, all the king's software and all the king's bugs, the end result is exactly the same: Good, old-fashioned analogue trust (GOFAT? to coin a phrase?) in the elves that make my computer run.
Protecting against malicious users grabbing all of the good names first using zero-trust blockchain networks requires the protections we all know against Sybil attacks. These protections are problematic for numerous reasons I don't think I need to enumerate here.
The point is that not solving that problem results in a system that is far less complicated and resource efficient. Some times the better solution is to rely on social/political/judicial systems instead of protecting against hypothetical malicious actors.
- all the good dotcoms have been squatted on since the 90s (that's why half the startups have gibberish names). particularly desirable domains are being squatted on even on all the random dotbullshit nu-tlds.
- the social/political/judicial systems are the very reason why there are so many attempts to build an alternative to registrars and DNS
I will readily agree that so far all attempts have failed though, being either too complex/clunky, or tainted with a crypto grift - I'm actually happy that namecoin/ens/handshake/etc got virtually no adoption. but it has to be done eventually. the entire industry is a scam and rent-seeking with unlimited profit margins
So you either have to disambiguate names at a protocol level (miki://whatever.eth vs edent://whatever.eth) or at a name level (whatever.eth.miki vs whatever.eth.edent)
Or, you convince everyone in the world to standardise on one chain. In which case, how's that difference from what we have already?
However, Coinbase (part of the 7 admin keyholders of ENS) had a closer look at .eth addresses and their use in their wallet and decided to remove support for it and instead use .id for their Coinbase wallet. [0]
Why did they do this? It turns out that:
"New crypto users with no previous exposure to ENS would make the false assumption that the ".eth” domain only works" for sending and receiving $ETH."
[0] https://twitter.com/matt_willemsen/status/154901782285598310...
Stats: https://dune.com/makoto/ens
Note that ENS is not only ETH, it supports multiple coins, and it's also compatible with the legacy DNS namespace, so it's possible to import & use tlds such as .com
In general, not a fan of BNS beyond that, through, as upkeep is too resource intensive. It is just not a sustainable and efficient thing to do for names.
Blockchain DNS will probably happen first, but i think name resolution which doesn’t require global consensus is under-appreciated. it’s like if i ask wikipedia (or a non-localized Google) for the page on “i3”, v.s. asking a random selection of my friends for the page on “i3”: i’m just always going to get a better result by more heavily weighting the response of my peers than the responses of people far-removed from me.
The problem is that malware and spam have gray areas where some people are ok with it, but others don't.
We should allow all of those existing, and instead limit what we experience by filtering/censoring
In other words, instead of censoring globally, we should censor locally at a community level
I don't think it would be any easier if you can't take any recourse besides blacklisting a pubkey there could be billion billions of. Even things that have no gray area would be nearly impossible to curtail in large volumes.
What you won't be able to do is remove at the root, and instead you blacklist
My claim is that under a decentralized DNS, "removing" or "blacklisting" have the same effect on what you consume because you are always in control.
The BIG difference is that, under a decentralized DNS, no one controls anymore what OTHER people consume/trust. And I am strongly against of any group of people limiting how other groups communicate between themselves, even if these "other groups" are sharing child pornography. I'm open to some data about this, meanwhile I have a strong bias into thinking the cure is much worse than the disease
I'm really sorry, but this infrastructure has functioned for more than two decades. It takes a massive amount of manhours daily to deal with abuse. How can you unironically defend and claim that a system that removes most punitive measures will be good or usable? Is it delusion or naivety?
A major problem when designing a decentralized naming system, or any naming system at all really, is preventing malicious users from grabbing all the cool names for themselves. The only way to do this is to make acquiring domains costly, and blockchains are a perfect way to enforce that in a decentralized manner. Other problems include accurately tracking domain ownership and letting the owners transfer domains to others, which cryptocurrencies have solved long ago. As an added benefit, because all domains in such a system are owned by a public key, we suddenly no longer need a root of trust for TLS, instead, we accept any TLS certificate signed by that public key.