How to setup a Handshake site with Caddy | Hacker News Reader

How to setup a Handshake site with Caddy

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46 pointsNetOpWibby28 comments

More London Trust Media Holdings corporate moves to try to monetize the FOSS properties he's bought (Private Internet Access, Linux Journal, freenode, snoonet). Handshake was/is an attempt to use Freenode to start a cryptocurrency to further enrich himself. But since the Freenode community didn't bite I guess they're casting a wider net now.

This statement made by superkuh is false in its entirety.

1. LJ - Bankrupted, 500K debt. LTMH paid off the debt in full and funded the operation for the next 2 years, before a much more well funded entity was able to take over - for free. Earnings: negative. Profit potential activity: 0. Funding: > 2m.

2. freenode - Reached out to LTMH for funding multiple times and LTMH always obliged. Earnings: negative. Profit potential activity: 0. Funding: > 1m.

3. Snoonet - Continues to run under its own policies. Earnings: negative. Profit potential activity: 0. Funding: > 50K.

Other:

Handshake is not an LTMH project. That being said, the Handshake project received 10m of funding and provided all of it to FOSS projects.

If it isn't clear to anyone else, this commentor saying I am wrong is the owner of the corporation.

Thanks for clarifying!

No problem. Perhaps you can clarify something for me. Do you think being technically correct about LTMH not being involved matters when you yourself are leading it and PIA and the linux journal are involved in promoting it?

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/vcs-are-investing-big-n... (https://archive.is/IK7w8)

>Just released, Handshake brings with it the much needed security and reliability on which we rely... The project and protocol has been led by Joseph Poon (creator of Bitcoin's Lightning Network), Andrew Lee (CEO of Purse), Andrew Lee (founder of Private Internet Access or PIA) and Christopher Jeffrey (CTO of Purse).

Legal shell games work for legal issues. But we're all just humans here and it sure looks like you are running the show.

Thanks for the reply.

I don't see how LJ, who commonly writes about DNS for example, writing about a DNS project handing 136m to the FOSS community with the help of the top VCs in Silicon Valley while moving ownership of the DNS root to the commons isn't a topic LJ would cover?

As you can see many other publications covered this as well.

In terms of the shell games comment, it's definitely true I have or had a stake in many of the entities you spoke of, thru LTMH. However, I was not in operational control.

Case in point: On snoonet, I owned the cryptocurrency channel. However, I was deopped and removed from founder as the subreddit, /r/cryptocurrency/, claimed ownership over it. Snoonet's policies dictate that the owner of the subreddit owns the namespace on Snoonet.

Any other questions that you have that you'd like me to help to try to clarify?

Thanks again for your questions and comments!

How is PIA a FOSS property?

I love Caddy (running my own personal page with it), and I think DNS is one of the few truly useful applications of blockchains.

Unfortunately, Handshake is a blockchain that builds consensus via Proof-of-Work and the environmental impact cannot be ignored. The Handshakw FAQ[1] handwaves it away by saying that most of the energy probably comes from renewables and they hope it'll be almost all of it soon, but provides no sources for this critical assertion.

[1]: https://handshake.org/faq/

Do you really need light-ca? Caddy ships with smallstep, i.e. can act as its own CA, and can act as an ACME server for mTLS even.

All you need to do is use "tls internal" (instead of specifying a cert/key), and if you want enable the ACME server, then you can use the "acme_server" directive https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/acme_serve...

I had no idea! Welp, TIL!

I don't understand how Handshake isn't fraud. They're "selling" ownership of domains that they don't own. ICANN owns the domains. It'd be like if I decided that I was going to replace US property records with a blockchain, and I began by reallocating 70% of the land in the United States to open-source developers.

ICANN is only operating a very limited number of TLDs. Handshake has reserved those for ICANN, and introduced many more TLDs to choose from.

> Yes, there is a blockchain involved but we're not going to get into that.

Maybe provide a link to people interested in learning or wondering why the blockchain part might be concerning/daunting.

I don't know anything about this project, but blockchains are the only known technology that can let people globally register human-readable names without allowing any other party to tamper with them. So it's not surprising that one is used by an alternative DNS root project. The more concerning/daunting thing is trying to do an alternative DNS root at all.

Creating an alternative or an extension to the DNS root is pretty ambitious. If they had chosen a TLD similar to .eth, .bit ... etc., it would have been more manageable, and they could've avoided issues with name collisions.

However, there are some advantages to decentralizing trust in the root since there won't be a need for a root KSK[0] or a central entity that manages the root zone making DNSSEC + DANE more appealing even for existing TLDs.

[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/dnssec/root-signing-ceremony/

The central KSK is a reason for normal users to dislike DNSSEC, but it's not why virtually nobody in the industry has deployed it, even though we're rapidly closing in on 3 decades of standardization effort for it.

Handshake is a deeply silly idea; literally, the Internet analog of selling the Brooklyn Bridge.

> The central KSK is a reason for normal users to dislike DNSSEC, but it's not why virtually nobody in the industry has deployed it, even though we're rapidly closing in on 3 decades of standardization effort for it.

I'm aware of the complexity DNSSEC adds and your opinions on it ;) it's getting easier to deploy with modern resolvers (also ed25519 is now more widely supported)

I still think it makes sense to cut the middleman (certificate authorities) one day and rely directly on DNS (whether its DNSSEC, DNSCurve, or some other way).

> Handshake is a deeply silly idea; literally, the Internet analog of selling the Brooklyn Bridge.

I think seeing whether a blockchain (specifically made for DNS) is suitable for this problem is more important at this point. At the end of the day, if you don't like name collisions with ICANN, you can add a suffix to the namespace like `.hns` (using some proxy) or just prefer ICANN TLDs in the resolver.

A blockchain-based TLD like dot-hns would be one thing, but that's not what Handshake is, right? Handshake looks at the existing DNS infrastructure built over the last 35 years or so, says "oh, that's ours", and sells shares in it.

I believe they distributed around 70% of the coin supply to open source developers (I think only a small percentage claimed so far). The names are sold in auctions and the coins are burned after the winner is declared (I understand that early adopters will still benefit from that).

It's decentralized, and ultimately, users will decide how they value those names, though. So, for example, they can put them under dot-hns or prioritize ICANN TLDs in case of a name collision. Some existing TLDs may decide to claim their name if they disagree with a centralized root. IMO, It's flexible and pretty experimental for now

If I try to sell you shares in the Brooklyn Bridge, it doesn't so much matter if I've distributed many or even most of the shares to open source developers. I don't own the bridge.

yeah that's the thing who owns the bridge? some may argue that control of ownership should be decentralized and some may disagree. but like I said it wouldn't be too bad if users ended up using it under some TLD but that's my opinion

I don't know who owns the bridge. What I know is that these people don't. Literally their only claim to it is deciding it's theirs to sell. It's a batshit plan and it's shocking to me that anyone takes it seriously. I want to do the same thing with ARP. You gotta pay me to talk to your Wi-Fi router. Affordable and convenient payment plans are available.

I think the analogy here is weak. A blockchain-based naming system is different, though. It's governed by consensus. The majority of users must agree on who owns a particular name or at least that's how it should work.

Don't know of any other way to create a decentralized name system without doing something similar (regardless if it's top level or secondary level names)

Should ICANN open up ccTLDs, .eth is going to have a collision with Ethiopia. Whether Ethiopia is interested in operating a TLD is another story.

Ethiopia = .et

I did, at the bottom. (0)

If you're curious about the Handshake project, this is basically all I needed to hear: they based their domain-claiming system on DNSSEC -- and when they launched they couldn't even claim their _own domain_ because .org was still signed with a RSASHA1-NSEC3-SHA1 key: https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd/issues/399

There's a massive gifting effort within the Handshake community and I'm pretty sure a community member owns it now.

- http://handshake.hns.to

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