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Comment by gbalduzzi | Hacker News Reader

> It is impossible for the blockchain to prove anything about anything that originates from outside of that particular blockchain

True, but instead of having to trust a central authority for insertion, updating, removal and constant maintenance of your "ownership", the trust would only be required for insertion. Once you purchased a domain and it's inserted in the blockchain, no one (outside of yourself) should be able to revoke, change or question your ownership of the domain itself.

Honestly it would be a pretty good use case for a blockchain, but it lacks a money incentive for any part involved so it will probably never happen

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If you were an important, powerful or influential organisation, you could just get DNS servers, OSes and/or browsers to special-case a domain rather than refer to the blockchain. Unless you have a legal authority enforcing the rule that "what the blockchain says, goes".

So what happens when Microsoft disagrees that I own Microsoft.block?

E: Honest question, comes off as snark a little - would they be able to just take it somehow or would they need to use jailtime and or broken kneecaps to get it off you? Either way the blockchain's concept of ownership seems like it would be broken easily by law and companies with lots of money

They hardcode their IP into IE/Edge and Windows as the host for that domain, ignoring what the blockchain says.

Or more likely, in partnership with other big tech with similar concerns, they develop an infrastructure that permits blocking/revoking/overriding specific domains, that most clients would refer to in preference to the blockchain. This would be fairly easy to justify on grounds of security and crime.

Or they just don't support the blockchain stuff in the first place, because the current system mostly works and provides a legal process for disputes which they are content with.

> Or they just don't support the blockchain stuff in the first place

This is a given, it's strictly hypothetical.

> they develop an infrastructure that permits blocking/revoking/overriding specific domains, that most clients would refer to in preference to the blockchain

Luckily we already have something similar to fall back on already, that's a time saver!

Would this also handle domain expiry in some way?

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