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In a way, I'm saying that:

1. I want a project like Handshake to be successful as well, and I agree it has a long way to go - the trade-offs are numerous, high-magnitue, and (sadly) opaque.

But also, 2. Having seen first-hand how these things take shape over long periods of time (the second decade of Bitcoin's existence is just getting started), Handshake needs help, is designed to be flexible, and you can help. In fact, I'd argue you already are helping, and in ways the average crypto-native community member trumpeting blind-eyed optimism - is not. :)

> Registering a TLD in Handshake may end up being significantly more complicated and significantly more costly than buying a .org domain today

It’s significantly easier than the process is today. It’s very hard to get a TLD from ICANN as the process consists of a non refundable application fee of 185k with no guarantees you’ll be approved.

> There's no market information I can find about what a TLD will cost on average.

Rather than artificial set costs, the market will dictate this.

> The intention is still for TLD owners to be able to sell access to subdomains, which will enable the exact same rent seeking and exploitation.

People can either register their own TLDs or choose one owned by someone who doesn’t want to gouge people.

> Auctions are blind, so you have almost no guarantees at all -- you'll just have to guess what the market value is.

Yes, and every bidder will have to be serious about wanting to win a domain instead of squatting every last domain.

I appreciate your comments, and understand your concerns. I would be irritated too if I couldn’t find information about how this worked. Unfortunately, all the details (like Bitcoin was at the beginning) are buried in technical papers and developer docs. Luckily, Handshake is a community owned, community run project, and comments like yours help to propel the project forward and bring the explanation that people deserve.

Thank you for your help and questions, and please keep them coming!

> Rather than artificial set costs, the market will dictate this.

But you're coming into this conversation claiming that Handshake is going to democratize TLDs, that anyone will be able to buy one. We don't really know that the average cost of a TLD won't spike up to a thousand dollars, right? We don't know that every fortune 500 company in the world and every government in the world won't step in and snatch up every auction that gets posted. By design, there's no way for us to stop them from doing that.

There are very plausible scenarios here where ordinary people will not be able to buy TLDs under Handshake. Meanwhile, the worst case pricing scenario for the .com domain market, even with all of the centralization problems, is that it ends up costing $10-20 more per year over the 5-10 years.

I'm not saying that there aren't advantages to letting the market decide, and I'm not saying that the worst-case scenario will necessarily happen. It might be great. But I am saying that people learning about Handshake for the first time are looking at it as a drop-in replacement for .com, and it's decidedly not. I'm skeptical anyone has any idea what price or availability is going to be.

> or choose one owned by someone who doesn’t want to gouge people.

Without protocol-level migration tools between TLDs this is still centralization. I'm still stuck relying on a rented product owned by a private individual that I can move away from.

Remember, when .com and .org came out, they were also owned by an organization that didn't want to gouge people.

The decentralization benefits of Handshake are entirely encapsulated in ordinary people owning their own TLDs. We really shouldn't be talking about rented subdomains at all, rented subdomains are the problem that Handshake was advertised as solving.

> Unfortunately, all the details (like Bitcoin was at the beginning) are buried in technical papers and developer docs.

For what it's worth, Handshake isn't the only project of its type that struggles with this. It was similarly difficult to find out how projects like IPFS really worked.

> We don't know that every fortune 500 company in the world and every government in the world won't step in and snatch up every auction that gets posted. By design, there's no way for us to stop them from doing that.

There is a scarcity of coins which will help to prevent this. Whenever you bid on a name, your coins are further locked up until the end of the auction.

> Remember, when .com and .org came out, they were also owned by an organization that didn't want to gouge people.

No I don’t remember this - it never happened. Quick history lesson: It was 50 dollars to get a .com or any name, and later 35 dollars. Network solutions had a monopoly on it.

> The decentralization benefits of Handshake are entirely encapsulated in ordinary people owning their own TLDs.

Absolutely! In addition, it serves to solve issues with the CA system. It democratizes ownership of the internet and makes it safer.

People are already purchasing TLDs for affordable prices. .coin sold for 200k HNS ($50k at market price) but there’s have been dozens of other TLDs registered for less than $10. Any alphanumeric name less than 63 characters can be registered so you can almost always find a good name that is affordable https://namebase.io/domains

You raise some extremely good points here, and you're right, the trade offs are massive, partially due to how early the project is.

My view is that maturity of the project will bring some of the answers everyone is looking for.

As an anecdote, the first name auctions are actually ending in the next 48h.

Mean bids for early names (a few hundred) from the last time I looked in a cli were under 10 HNS, so under 5 USD at current prices. .coin for low thousands of USD. .11 for low hundreds of USD.

So that may give you a bit of an early view of what the prices are looking like. All subject to change of course because the auctions are not done yet.

For what it's worth, as someone enthusiastic about Handshake, crypto, and decentralized systems in general...I can totally empathize with the irritation you've expressed here. There's so much noise out there and 2017-2018 blockchain projects are notorious for over-promising on vague and impossible things, and then fading to nothing when the impossible things turn out to actually be impossible.

One thing I'd like to emphasize: Handshake's community may be what ends up being the differentiator against ICANN, less so anything financial or crypto related. I think that is what Rasengan is trying to accomplish here: build a true grassroots effort to work together to make Handshake a real contender. Because many of the readers here already have a piece of the network (majority of the coin supply being given not to investors, but Foss developers).

The simple notion that skilled, knowledgeable, opinionated, and generative individuals can have an outsized impact when raising concerns like this can be very powerful. Because it's an open network, many, many things are malleable, even economics/pricing/miner influence.

Decentralization has it's trade-offs. As Steve Waldman likes to say: "it's powerful at the edges, where Hayekian information flows can cover the blindspots of centralized efficiency".

https://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2019/02/tao-of-decentr...

> it's been really hard to get concise, clear information about how it works, even from the main project website.

I'm really glad that you said this. I was just all over the website and was feeling a little dumb because I was having trouble figuring out what this did in any sort of detail.