The Internet Can No Longer Be Censored
dns.live
dns.live
Handshake is a naming system built in a decentralized way utilizing blockchain. It's been quietly in development for several years, but it only launched in February of 2020. The system builds on top of the legacy DNS system, further extending and improving upon it, so all legacy domains will continue to resolve (e.g. ycombinator.com). However, since ycombinator was in the top 100K Alexa, it can also claim ycombinator. and simply use that name (more on this later).
The blockchain distributes names by 'releasing' permission to open an auction on a schedule wherein a SHA3 hash of a name is modulo'd (%) against 52 to determine the week it will be available. When a name is available, anybody can send an OPEN transaction which will subsequently open up a public blind Vickrey auction for everyone to participate. Potential buyers can then send bids and, whoever wins, will pay the second highest bid [1]. They can also add an optional blind to the bid to mask their actual bid (so I can bid 10, but add a blind of 50 to make it look like I bid 60 to try to scare people off for example - like a bluff in poker). After bidding ends, a reveal period starts where the actual bids are revealed.
Since launch, there have been a number of domains opened and sold. Some names have sold for quite a bit of value, such as crypto for 200,000 HNS [2]! This is at the time of this writing, the equivalent of $32,000.
Past naming projects have struggled for adoption due to the fact that existing stakeholders in the space (e.g., popular websites, etc.) were unable to obtain their own names. In order to make sure this would make sense for everyone in the world, the blockchain prereserved the top 100K domains (and the legacy internet, so all existing tlds) for the people who are leasing/holding these names today [3].
Recently, major websites including torrentfreak, voat and brave have claimed their names [4].
In terms of funding, the project received $10m from early sponsors [5] and donated it all to FOSS projects and non profit organizations [6][7][8][9][10][11][12]!
Unlike many of the 'blockchains' that have come into existence, a fundamental difference of Handshake has been that the founding team and earliest developers did not receive a substantial amount of coins. Instead, they received similar amounts to that of the original coin sponsors which includes the who's who of Silicon Valley. Further, the vast majority of the genesis coins have been distributed to FOSS developers (that's worth ~150m today) and FOSS/non profit projects [13]. There are a lot more coin allocations described in the design notes [14]. The blockchain is owned at a minimum by the open source internet community or, at best, the whole of humanity [15].
From an ownership perspective, the internet namespace, and the world namespace really, should belong to the people. Handshake is an experiment to deliver it to its rightful owners. From a technical perspective, Handshake creates an opportunity to finally upgrade our technology to gain real security as we will no longer need to rely on third party CAs [16] nor keep hot keys on servers since DNSSEC keys can be stored offline [17]. To be clear, without Handshake, DANE is a backdoor [18]. With Handshake, DANE is complete and the internet is more secure.
How can you get involved?
1. Start using a hosted or local resolver [19][20]!
2. Register a name and use it [21][22]!
3. Develop and integrate the Handshake Naming System with existing software.
4. Submit PRs to hsd[23] or the newer implementations that are being developed like the Rust implementation, rsd[24].
[1] https://www.namebase.io/blog/tutorial-3-basics-of-handshake-...
[2] https://hsd.tools/leaderboard
[4] https://dns.live/topclaim-clean.html
[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20191123130625/https://handshake...
[6] https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1...
[7] https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329
[8] https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives...
[9] https://www.gimp.org/news/2018/08/30/handshake-gnome-donatio...
[10] https://dot.kde.org/2020/01/21/kde-receives-generous-donatio...
[11] https://calligra.org/news/handshake-donation/
[12] http://guix.gnu.org/.i18n/de/blog/2018/gnu-guix-receives-don...
[13] https://github.com/handshake-org/hs-airdrop
[14] https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt ; Search for: "# Stakeholders"
[15] https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt ; Search for: "# Project Summary"
[16] https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/what-is-a-rogue-certificate...
[17] https://github.com/handshake-org/hdns
[18] https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2016/10/27/14-dns-nerds-dont-con...
[19] https://nextdns.io/
[20] https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd --rs-port 53 | port forward dest 127.0.0.1:53 -> 5350
[22] https://github.com/kyokan/bob-wallet
More companies are hosting their infrastructure based on large FAAMNG company resources and they have control over them and reserve the right to shutdown your service without notice if they want.
Some of them like Facebook and Google are already ICAAN members and are entrenched on the internet can never be avoided or even taken down and Google issues out domains for websites which they can choose to censor or take down if they want to. This is equivalent to having admin rights to the internet or parts of it.
Although very unlikely, if any one of them had bought a significant TLD like .org, .io or even .net or .com, then this mission would have failed.