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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

Kind of unrelated, but if there was ever a viable use case for blockchain beyond anarchist payment systems, it seems like it would be DNS.

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Totally agree. Another great thing about Handshake is the fact that this removes the need to rely on SSL CAs which have seen compromises time and time again.

No more rogue SSL certificates!

The closest thing there is right now would be ENS - the E stands for Ethereum.

ENS domain names can mainly be used for payment for now, so I'd be sending crypto to [domain].eth where the advantage is having a readable address instead of a random-looking string.

You can also host web pages on it (which I believe is helped by their IPFS) but that has seen limited use as of yet.

I work at Namebase. Handshake is compatible with ENS actually because Handshake has reserved .eth for ENS names. Since Handshake decentralizes the top-level namespace, Handshake can serve as a gateway to other naming systems like ENS and Namecoin.

Um, please tell me more :)

It can do that or it does do that? Also, ENS doesn't typically resolve to an IP but instead a swarm hash or a block address, what would end up resolving in those cases?

The way the the ENS integration would work is the DNS request for vitalik.eth would end up at a Handshake Authoritative Name Server and then there are certain blacklisted top level domains (.onion, .tor, .i2p, .bit and a few others) where a client for that protocol is instantiated and then a request is sent out to the appropriate system and then the response would be formatted into a DNS query by the Handshake Name Server and sent back to the client.

Not implemented yet, but this is where one would implement it https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd/blob/master/lib/dns/ser... https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd/blob/master/src/ns.c#L...

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