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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

No, that's not why they did it. They did it because they thought they could get away with it. But the charter of ISOC never was to make a mint of the .org TLD by selling it, and as far as I'm concerned this deal will be reversed at some point or we should simply set up an alternative root and a pox on both their houses.

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OpenNIC would be that alternative root although often are they at odds with ICANN creating new tlds that conflict with their own. It seems like the DNS system in it's current form is broken and I'm not convinced an alternative root is the solution but perhaps part of one.

Handshake.org is trying to create an alternative root that is better (along the dimensions of security and governance) than the current system. I can see it gaining adoption especially in light of recent events.

I forgot they existed, thank you for reminding me!

Maybe I'm just cynical, but the fact that the first thing mentioned on their homepage is a cryptocurrency "airdrop" doesn't leave me with a confident feeling about the project's long-term viability.

That's a fair response. That said, it's worth noting:

> The Project Sponsors received a minority participation (7.5%) of HNS in the interest of aligning all stakeholders, including industry. All of the 10.2MM USD collected from Project Sponsors (Funds and Individuals) will be given to Free and Open Source Software projects.

The rest was all airdropped in an attempt to get wide distribution / get it in the hands of as many users as possible.

Honestly, that doesn't allay my concerns at all. It all reeks of a pump-and-dump scheme. (I'm not saying that Handshake is trying to execute this scheme, but that they remind me of other projects which have done so.)

The pattern for these projects is pretty predictable: Promise amazing things from a technical project associated with a cryptocurrency token. Premine a bunch of those tokens and give them to insiders, then airdrop the token to create a market. The insiders sell off their tokens, and the project is forgotten.

As I've said previously in other discussions, OpenNIC is, quite simply, in no position to replace ICANN. They're a tiny amateur operation with no organized governance, no formal registries, and very little infrastructure. (Many of their "root" resolvers are hosted on small VPS providers like Linode and DigitalOcean.)

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