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swiley

The article doesn’t mention how the .crypto namespace is managed. That’s probably going to make or break this idea.

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Don't have time (nor the interest really) but found the reference docs, seems to explain how it works:

- https://github.com/unstoppabledomains/zns

- https://github.com/unstoppabledomains/zns/blob/master/REGIST...

- https://github.com/unstoppabledomains/zns/blob/master/RESOLV...

- https://github.com/unstoppabledomains/zns/blob/master/REGIST...

So in the end, I think there is a central registrar for each gTLD, so basically the same as we're doing now, just a different organization behind it and blockchain!1!11oneone

The Registrar is an ethereum contract, not a company, though. I believe this means that once you have a domain tied to your wallet, nobody can take it down or transfer it without your private keys. The Admins can only sell new domains.

Opera works with Unstoppable Domains for the .crypto domains. Maybe you can look it up at UD's website https://community.unstoppabledomains.com/t/unstoppable-x-ope... to see how to manage the .crypto?

Not OP, but nothing on there seems to explain whether UD is just running a database-backed DNS server which they could change at their whim / govt order, or whether ownership and DNS records are actually stored on-chain ala Ethereum's ENS, or NameCoin.

Reading the website/github, the domains are stored on-chain, but UD provides an HTTP API (essentially a DNS-over-HTTPS resolver), and that could obviously be censored. It's not clear to me if Opera is reading directly from the chain or using UD's API, but I suspect the latter.

If that's the case, then I think that qualifies as reasonably decentralized, at least for me.

Theoretically, anyone could make a work-alike resolver service that used their own Ethereum node to query for results; in which case any attempts to censor UD could be routed around by pointing opera to a different dns-over-http server (assuming that is configurable, which is really up to opera, not the protocol).

I do like that idea actually -- if I published a self-signed SSL cert for my domain on the Ethereum blockchain, that could be returned and used to validate my domain, without any sort of CA having to be involved. The only trust needed would be that the HTTP-DNS-Ethererum server itself wasn't lying about which public key owned the on-chain domain record.

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