Handshake: An experimental peer-to-peer root DNS
handshake.org
handshake.org
Why was this done as an alternate root project rather than an alternate tld? I get it makes the project more useful (ability to register .johnsmith rather than johnsmith.bit), but it's going to severely increase complications when interoperating with the ICANN dns root.
what happens if you register .foobar on handshake, and then a few years later, ICANN delegates .foorbar? If you let the ICANN registration take precedence, all the .foobar domain owners on handshake side will lose their registrations. The threat of that will keep most people from using tlds registered on handshake. Why buy a domain on .foobar (handshake root) rather than .foobaz (ICANN root)? It might cost a few bucks more, but honestly I'd be willing to pay a few dollars/year more knowing my domain is secure.
Of course, it's possible that operator of the ICANN tld would give an opportunity for the domain owners on the handshake side to migrate over, but then they'd miss out on all the revenue on those premium domains. why allow the old owners of pizza.foobar keep their domain when you can resell it for $$$?
The project mentions that they have pre-reserved certain TLDs, but all that does is delay the inevitable. The first conflicts are going to be with yet-to-be-delegated gTLDs, since they're not in the current root (obviously), and they're not in the alexa 100k (while they're some sites with generic words as domains, most of them are squatted, which means they're probably not in the alexa 100k).
The only hope of this project surviving is if they gain critical mass and overtake ICANN as the most popular root. The network effect is insane with DNS (maybe even higher than with social networks), so unless there's a good reason for everyone to use this, I think this project will stay very niche.
A particular TLD (.bit) would clash with ICANN the same, unless someone would keep shelling $185k/y for keeping it up. This does not look very realistic. Registering a TLD is the only official way to interact with ICANN in this area, and I don't see ICANN making any concessions to an outright competitor. Even if registered, such a domain would make little sense: now every Handshake user would depend on ICANN again, hoping it will not hand the TLD to some other registrar (e.g. due to a failure to pay the yearly $185k). This sort of defeats one of the purposes of the project.
Not having a single traditional TLD at the end does have upsides. Any name with a long TLD immediately stands out as a Handshake name. Any reasonable person would register a domain very unlikely to clash with ICANN's TLDs. The lack of need to belong to a handful of TLDs allows to e.g. use dashes instead of dots, lowering the chance of a conflict: not joe.crypto.exchange but joe-crypto-exchange. (Of course people who want to squat short common words likely to be made TLDs by ICANN may do it at their own peril.)
Explicitly being at odds with ICANN forces the project to handle this outright, add a conflict-resolution policy applied at the client side: on a conflict, prefer which source at which domain? How to indicate a conflict anyway? There are no one-size-fits-all solutions here, but reasonable solutions should exist.
In general, I think the technical merits outweigh the risk of name clashes significantly for almost any reasonable user. (Unreasonable users will always exist; they should not be paid too much attention.)
A single TLD could reasonably be added to IANA's registry of special suffixes, since it wouldn't be part of the DNS hierarchy that ICANN is responsible for they'd have no claim on $185k or any other amount of money.
But a parallel hierarchy is never going to get that, so basically this choice ensures an up-hill battle, presumably mostly so that like other parallel hierarchies its proponents can make hollow claims about "owning" names that actually are meaningless, it's like buying land claims on Mars.
Main-net launch only 1 month away.
Other crypto projects should take note. This is how to prove you're serious.
7% going to contributors and 7% going to financial backers is a pretty big incentive. [0]
I’d rather see this set up as a non profit foundation or a community driven trust and run in an OSS way for the financial elements. As it is, I don’t think we should create a decentralized network with such significant financial incentives.
But they will have to re-build the user base and since handshake.org is literally giving away $10m to build it's user base, it might be difficult.
I think we are better off with some sort of community consensus protocol and the only benefit of giving away “$10m” is to gain even more money for the developers. Standards should be open or driven by a commodity cost model, not a “inventor gets rich” model. Their plan accounts for plans when the chain value is over $50B. That is unlikely, but it means there’s a model in the developers plans where $7B in value is held by the developers and investors.
DNS and other Internet standards never would have succeeded using compensation models like this. I can’t think of any RFCs that would have such payouts for the main contributors.
(I hope a project contributor is reading/commenting)
Q: Let's say I'm a representative of a company that wants to buy their name "example.com" to be resolved via Handshake. Assuming things are live and running well, what's the process by which we'd get www.example.com resolving to 123.123.123.123? (keeping it simple, not worrying about mx and srv records yet) How stable and safe is our record, assuming we owned the trademark for example.com?
With your private key you can also do interesting things like verify your subdomains with signatures ala DNSSEC or verify your own SSL certs without CAs.
The paper also mentions future improvements that could see each TLD using a side-chain (like plasma) to manage and possibly sell their own subdomains. This could also give each TLD owner more control over their own "consensus rules" for their particular TLD.
There are a lot more possibilities here, some are covered in the paper, many more are still to be explored.
Super excited for this project!
So of looks like this could also mean some changes in how we actually use the web, not just how DNS is managed.
If you want to search leave it off.
On top of that Chrome already has the ability to redirect you straight to the domain if it is well defined. I can't imagine it difficult to move that logic to google redirects instead.
e.g. "test.vm" goes to a google search despite being url format. "test.dev" goes to domain.
"I'll prefix the domain with https:// so I will directly establish a secure connection because leaving it out implicitly means plain http, which makes me vulnerable to mitm attacks" - nobody outside tech, ever
And it wouldn't be any different here. Over the last decade we've been so focused on dumbing down tech enough so that it's accessible to pretty much anyone on the planet. It will be very hard to reverse this trend. Even just adding a trailing slash is cumbersome. I can only imagine how many million man hours we'd have to waste worldwide to explain that to the average Joe and their mom. Just remembering how many times I've seen people type a backslash instead of a slash in URLs, this will be fun.
How does this work after the handshake network launches?
If I register a new domain with ICANN, but do not register it with Handshake, can someone else? And if not, doesn’t that mean ICANN is still the central authority for domain names? (Including transfers)
It seems like the existing root zone & handshake will immediately fork, and then how will 3rd parties determines which root zone is correct? Doesn’t that still mean existing CA’s could simply update the root zone (regardless of handshake) (which is the existing problem with bad actor CA’s).
I’m probably missing something here, could anyone elaborate?
The goal of the project seems admirable. Potentially, this can help fund open source initiatives which are sorely underfunded while solving the "how do we find a domain in a decentralized way and verify its trust" issue that currently exists. I suppose time will tell, though.
Icaan will continue to be relevant, this will just control all other tlds.
This is just my understanding after doing some reading last night - someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Its also mined, so give it a try!
How would someone 3 years from now have access to generate coins/tokens after the protocol increases the difficulty and stops generating coins so easily?
Wouldn't it be cheaper just to run a normal DNS server? What's the use case?
They would have to expend hashing power solving a previously solved block puzzle while continuing to build the blockchain off their new branch and ensure that its total difficulty is greater than any competing chain.
So suppose you immediately buy up TLD "foo", get a single confirmation on it, and publish it to your fanbase. The 51% attacker would be able to a) use their hashing power to publish their different solution to the block where your TLD got included, b) include their own purchase of "foo" in their alternate block, and c) continue building on their alternate chain to make it the canonical state of the transaction db. So your fanbase would look for "foo" and get the attacker's zone.
However, if we're five years into Handshake's existence and you hold one of the very first TLDs published in their blockchain, the attacker cannot immediately take over your TLD. They'd have to go back to the block where you made your purchase (or I guess when you renewed) and solve puzzles all the way up until the total difficulty of their chain exceeds the current canonical chain. Which they can do with 51% given enough time.
Also note that an attacker can begin/develop a 51% attack without publishing anything at all to the network.
It seems to me that this can only be true if it's also impossible for the legitimate owner to change this. If it can be changed, then the 51% attacker can change it.
The actual DNS contains names with hugely long cache lifetimes and very little practical agility, and it also contains "fast flux" names whose RRs change constantly. If this experiment is only interested in the former it should highlight that, as a shortcoming.
People started buying up tons of obvious namecoin names while they were cheap, as speculators.
Although one of the best ways to discourage squatting is to reduce scarcity. Have hundreds of TLDs (.cars, .bank, .farm, .repair, .plumber, .housing, etc.), or if you're not ICANN and don't want to pollute the global namespace with multiple TLDs then second level domains (.cars.bit, bank.bit, etc.)
Then a squatter has to register hundreds of times as many names and each name has hundreds of times fewer prospective buyers. Combine this with some nominal cost ($10/year) to holding a name, irrelevant to normal users but prohibitive to someone who wants to hold trillions of names hostage. And which you want to have regardless to be able to reclaim names that have been abandoned.
Domain Squatting is border line extortion. It's not your usual business because there is no competition possible : there is only one person that can own the domain. If a squatter registers the name of a well known company on a TLD they weren't present in, then mail them saying they put some porn website on it and put money in SEO, there is little the company can do except paying absurd amount of money to get control over the domain (mind you, Handshake would not prevent that, from what I see).
In a less dark way, you may also have to change your startup name because someone is squatting a domain and you don't have any money yet to buy it, which is a real nuisance when you think that person is doing absolutely nothing with that domain.
We already have https://www.eff.org/observatory, and anyone can run a DNS server for free.
If I could make a suggestion to the maintainers - I think it would be helpful to put the "project paper" in an additional format besides just the text file.
The handksahake.org site is really easy on the eyes but I found reading through a text file of this length quite a slog.
Guessing an insider on is hoping to exploit this for financial gain and control of this isolated DNS pool.
and why would users want to participate in a protocol which inherently relinquishes centralized accountability and responsibility, in favor of a security model that allows any of these mining warehouse operations run by anonymous robber barrons with enough excess capital to fill up an entire building with random number generating electricity wasting heaters?
Who thinks this is seriously a good idea for anything other then exploiting greater fools to sell digital beanie babies to?