- Names are released at a trickle, meaning no one can buy all of them in one go.
- Names have to be constantly renewed (it's not a buy-once-keep-forever scheme), and (correct me if I'm wrong), you can't buy 10 years out in advance.
- A large portion of the initial names are reserved for Open Source developers, under the assumption that squatting won't be so much of a problem if they get first pick.
It's still not clear to me how this solves resource scarcity.
- If names are released at a trickle, does this mean I might want to register a domain for a project and there literally won't be any able available for me to choose from?
- If names have to be renewed on a year-by-year basis, is there any mechanism for archival? Won't this be strictly worse for link rot?
- If names are released at a trickle, doesn't this create an even greater incentive for both good and bad actors to grab them as soon as they become available?
I'm mildly interested in Handshake because based on very limited research it seems in general to be an improvement over what we have. I get that perfect is the enemy of the good, I would take almost any improvement over the existing system. But at the same time, I still just don't understand how this helps solve the squatter problem -- every once and a while I ask and get an explanation, and then think about it for a while and end up having more questions.
My perspective is, we want everyone to be online. We want everyone to have their own blog, we want people to be able to create websites on impulse. And we want resilient, long-term links that can serve as permanent addresses for content. The idea of combating squatters is based on the assumption that domain names will continue to be a scarce resource. But you fundamentally can't have domains be a limited resource that are difficult to hoard if you also want random/poor elementary school kids to be able to buy them.
Handshake talks about solving Zooko's triangle: human-meaningful, decentralized, or secure. But the way I originally heard Zooko's triangle explained to me (which may have been wrong) was: human-meaningful, secure, high-availability. Am I correct in assuming that in the second version, Handshake is optimized for human-meaningful and secure at the expense of high-availability? That domains will continue to be a limited, scarce resource that are susceptible to hoarding by people with lots of money? Or are there other mechanisms here that I don't understand?