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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"Blockchains never shut down"

Yes, they do. See this long list of failed altcoins.[1]

Minor cryptocurrencies can fail in some unexpected ways.[2] The classic 51% attack has happened in practice to several altcoins.[3] There's also a "burst mining" attack, which can happen automatically - a big mining pool's control system determines that it would be profitable to divert the pool to briefly mining some altcoins and get all the blocks for a while. Then the difficulty goes way up, and the big pool goes off to do something else. Now the difficulty is so high that no blocks get mined at all for a considerable period of time and transactions stall.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=588413.0 [2] http://www.ofnumbers.com/2014/06/03/thread-of-the-day-list-o... [3] https://maxminer.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/ftc_51attack.pd...

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Also, guys, please do research before starting new projects. There are already MULTIPLE identity verification services out there specifically designed to use blockchains. By all means, work on new projects, but if there are formal standards out there, make your implementation 1) interact with those seamlessly, and 2) consider long and hard as to what you're bringing to the table over existing, more mature projects. It's counter-intuitive, but actually developing nothing is better for decentralization than developing a competing project w/r/t user adoption and community fracture.

https://okturtles.com/ is the most successful of them so far. I am not a crypto expert (even less of a blockchain expert) but the code looks pretty good, and the ecosystem is pretty mature. It has 1) its own aux. DNS service which is tied to your key (somewhat like Tor routing via onion but with acceptable latency), 2) decentralized IdP via block chains, 3) a browser plugin, 4) a whole lot more (see the Github linked below.

https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain/blob/master/README.md

https://www.indolering.com/dnschain-is-harmful

From the article:

Update I’ve written a more-up-to-date technical overview of okTurtles, DNSChain, and Unblock.us. While the security model for DNSChain has improved, they are still misrepresenting the security parameters of their software.

I’m going to leave this up since it debunks what DNSChain was selling. I also think their resistance to outside security concerns is very troubling.

TL;DR

DNSChain erroneous claims to have passed a “peer review” process. However, its most important peers, Namecoin developers, have rejected it. This has been the reaction of every Namecoin developer who has evaluated the project (over four at this point). The project misrepresents its security model, its design is unfixable, it should not be used in any nonlocal capacity.

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