Hacker News Reader

Comment by cedricdahl | Hacker News Reader

If you're looking to easily play with Handshake, checkout https://namebase.io

Recently chatted with the co-founder, Tieshun. He does a good job of making the case for Handshake and why it's so important for the internet. https://youtu.be/YRU0DE6zj5o

View on HN

This decries domain registrars as bein evil and pitches that with this platform you can become the same as them:

-----

Earn money selling subdomains off your TLD. Get paid recurring income for every subdomain you sell.

Distribution — Plug into Namebase's network of registrars, like gateway.io, to supercharge distribution for your TLD.

Peace of mind — We've got you covered. Namebase handles domain registration, revenue collection, and renewals. Sit back and collect your profits!

----

How is "a few people controlling top domains" the same as "many people controlling top domains"?

Because its still centralising control. If I want to use myrealname.tld, I need to pay someone sitting on that TLD while they 'sit back and collect the profits`. Its like a tech pyramid scheme.

So decentralizing control among potentially thousands of TLD owners is... centralizing control?

If you have a point you're not making it very clearly.

I don't get why this is so hard to understand. You keep putting forward a strawman of it being less entities, but that's missing the point entirely that it's still centralised, it being to a lesser extent does not negate that simple fact.

It's quite plainly not centralized to me. Could you explain what decentralized means to you?

I would turn this around and ask you the same. Using your own understanding of the term, what is centralized about the current status quo?

You keep using that word, but I don’t think you intend its normal meaning. Let’s take a different example, is home ownership in US centralized? Every reasonable person would say no, we don’t have few large entities that own every home. But you would say “Yes, because if I want to buy a home, the current owner would have complete ownership of that home, and a central entity I have to deal with!” But that’s not what centralized means in common parlance or litterateur.

That's an awful comparison and a strawman.

a decentralized namespace system would be something like:

* sibyl free identity system

* the highest bidder gets to rent a domain name

* everyone receives the average domain rent: the sum of all rent combined, divided by the number of unique users

* want a more desirable domain than the average? pay into the system to receive this special attention from the group

* satisfied with a less desirable or simply no domain? receive crypto for having others make use of your namespace attention

* prevent temporary hijacks: whenever a user clicks a link or types a URL, depending on how he configured his software it would show the different servers previous owners (say last 2 years) of the domain control, with their remarks etc; to make it easy for rightful owners of temporarily outbidded domains to point out this domain used to point to them but was hijacked...

an alternative to prevent hijacking: URL scheme for links mandates containing a block height at the time of writing the link; so when an author wishes to share a link he either copies the link from another document (thus containing the original block height) or he copies from the browser URL bar (which inserts the block height into the URL)

Yes. And his point is perfectly easy to understand.

While I do agree that this is a significant departure from the current system, is there some mechanism other than individual domain owners refusing to sell that prevents this from re-centralizing? As in entities with sufficient capital coming in and buying up huge amounts of domains and rent-seeking on those and effectively re-creating the existing system?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com