Comment by troquerre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by troquerre | Hacker News Reader

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Handshake has a number of mechanics built into it that I think give it a stronger chance of succeeding than previous attempts. It's similar to how there were numerous failed digital currency attempts before Bitcoin figured out all the mechanics necessary for success. Some of these mechanics are:

- There is no centralized party that owns Handshake. This allows for any party to step in and contribute to the protocol. We've already seen this play out in building Namebase (I'm the CEO) as numerous unrelated parties have come together to further Handshake adoption

- It's not just about opening up the TLD namespace. Handshake's main technical goal is to improve the security and censorship-resistance of DNS by shifting the root of trust from CAs to a distributed ledger. My article on the technical improvements Handshake can provide was previously discussed on HN [1]

- TLDs aren't sold for a set price. There's a vickrey auction which awards the TLD to the highest bidder. This creates a better distribution of names than selling at a set price or to the first buyer

- The Handshake coin (HNS) provides an incentive for miners to provide security to the network and for holders to support ongoing adoption of the protocol, similar to how Bitcoin holders have put in massive efforts to evangelize it (I recognize that on HN people may find the Bitcoin evangelists annoying but I believe Bitcoin wouldn't be where it is today without them)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995969

> - TLDs aren't sold for a set price. There's a vickrey auction which awards the TLD to the highest bidder. This creates a better distribution of names than selling at a set price or to the first buyer

for real money, USD or EUR or such? where does this money go? or do you have to first mine some cryptocoin, or buy it with real money, and it then goes to the entity 'namebase'?

scroll down here to the 'how it works': https://www.namebase.io/

this quite honestly looks really sketchy to me. I'd much rather take my chances with registering a domain name among the myriad of ICANN root nameserver gTLDs and ccTLDs than buy some weird, obscure cryptocoin, which can then be used to buy 'domain names' that only 0.000001% of the client devices presently operating on the planet can successfully resolve into IPs.

https://learn.namebase.io/starting-from-zero/buy-hns

all of this just looks like somebody has grafted 'blockchain' and 'crypto coins' onto the same alternative root DNS ideas that failed twenty years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

Great question. All Handshake names are registered with HNS through the auction process. Say you bid 1000 HNS on a name and I bid 900 HNS. You'd win that name and pay 900 HNS (the second highest bid price. Importantly, that fee doesn't go to Namebase or any other entity — the coins are burned on-chain so they go to no one.

uhhh, so I'm looking on the website right now, and it wants a scan of my passport or photo ID for the privilege of buying a virtual cryptocoin, that can be used for purchasing domain names almost nobody can currently resolve, which vanishes into thin air after the purchase? am I getting that right?

"Purchasing HNS with USD is currently limited to those with a US passport or ID."

Namebase is a service built on top of Handshake similar to how Coinbase builds on top of Bitcoin. It's an incorporated company that has to follow normal AML/KYC laws like other onramps. You don't have to go through Namebase to get HNS. Also, you can buy HNS with BTC without KYCing on Namebase. You can't sell or transfer the HNS without KYCing but you can still register names and transfer the names to other wallets without providing any passport info.

Can you explain how that works?

>There is no centralized party that owns Handshake.

Historically, blockchains haven't been terribly firm on the "irreversibility" point. Ethereum reversed the DAO transactions. The BTC rollbacks in 2010 and 2013. Etc etc.

In practice, whoever owns the client update server and whoever has 51% of the hashing power can make arbitrary changes to the chain. For most cryptocurrencies, a meeting of these stakeholders could fit into a phone booth.

You're right that Handshake can suffer from a 51% attack like other proof-of-work chains. Importantly, the security of DNS records on Handshake is strong even with the possibility of a 51% attack.

51% attacks on blockchains used as a store of value are bad because an attacker can spend their coins (ie BTC) on an exchange, withdraw their profits, then perform a 51% attack on the previous block to take back their spent coins.

On Handshake, that same attack exists for HNS, but DNS updates on chain take 36 blocks (about 6 hours worth of transactions) to propagate, which is significantly more expensive and unlikely than pulling off a normal 51% attack on a single block (it gets exponentially more unlikely). Furthermore this wouldn't even be an attack per se. An attacker may be able to undo a DNS update, but they wouldn't be able to falsify DNS records because only the owner of the name who controls the private key would be able to submit valid UPDATE transactioins.

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