Hacker News Reader

Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

Or you can simply trust the organization bootstrapping the naming system by other means and not use a blockchain to defend against this hypothetical scenario at a high energy/compute cost.

Some reasonable measures:

1. the organization could be a non-profit co-operative owned individually by its investors 2. the organization could establish a contract that enforces desired behaviour of participants by the judicial system

Voila, no blockchain needed.

View on HN

That only works if the users trust their government(s), where geopolitics are stable, and where freedom from censorship is a cultural norm. All of those things are increasingly rare, and centralized domain names are an easy way for states or competing governments to block access to undesirable materials.

The allure of a supranational DHT network is that it is more censorship-resistant, requiring deep packet inspection or attacks to block certain lookups.

I think this hypothetical consensus-based DNS blockchain sounds nice at first glance, but really, it just means that DNS is changed from an authority-based model to a consensus-based one. But consensus of what? It's not of people, but of resources -- compute power -- which states will always have more of, anyway. Like TOR, it just means the state has to control/surveil more "trusted" nodes. So it doesn't really solve anything.

You can't "web of trust" a global network of 8 billion people who don't have any interest in this stuff, don't want to peg their individual identities to some online system, and don't agree on what truth is to begin with. You can't techno-topia your way out of the cultural differences inherent in geopolitical disagreements.

> You can't techno-topia your way out of the cultural differences inherent in geopolitical disagreements.

Too true.

Computers won't "solve" social/political/cultural issues. They're reflections of the creators' politics. Even blockchains that purport to be egalitarian reflect the political ideology of their creators -- often naive at best or tyrannical themselves at worst.

> it just means that DNS is changed from an authority-based model to a consensus-based one. But consensus of what? It's not of people, but of resources -- compute power -- which states will always have more of, anyway.

If a blockchain became the norm, there would be no way for the state to have more compute power than the rest of the population

What do you mean? Blockchains are already heavily lopsided. Throwing state resources into the mix would only make that worse.

You think the government would have more than 51% of the compute power of the entire world? If that were true they could easily break TOR

Yes, quite trivially? Compute power is more a function of dollars than population. Don't they already surveil most Tor exit nodes?

> Yes, quite trivially? Compute power is more a function of dollars than population.

There is no way the government has enough servers and computers to come even close to 51% of the world's compute. And if they tried to print money and buy it all, it would be seen as ridiculous and the government would be sacked.

Also, surveilling TOR exit nodes is very different from owning over 51% of all TOR relays. The former won't help you deanonymize users, the latter most definitely will

Correct.

And as and user who does not understand, nor have the resources to meaningfully inspect, all the king's software and all the king's bugs, the end result is exactly the same: Good, old-fashioned analogue trust (GOFAT? to coin a phrase?) in the elves that make my computer run.

voila, it isn't any different than the current system.

While far from perfect the existing system has many properties that are good enough.

Protecting against malicious users grabbing all of the good names first using zero-trust blockchain networks requires the protections we all know against Sybil attacks. These protections are problematic for numerous reasons I don't think I need to enumerate here.

The point is that not solving that problem results in a system that is far less complicated and resource efficient. Some times the better solution is to rely on social/political/judicial systems instead of protecting against hypothetical malicious actors.

- they are nowhere nearly good enough. the current system satisfies only one criteria of the 'security, user-chosen names, and decentralization' trifecta, and even that just barely.

- all the good dotcoms have been squatted on since the 90s (that's why half the startups have gibberish names). particularly desirable domains are being squatted on even on all the random dotbullshit nu-tlds.

- the social/political/judicial systems are the very reason why there are so many attempts to build an alternative to registrars and DNS

I will readily agree that so far all attempts have failed though, being either too complex/clunky, or tainted with a crypto grift - I'm actually happy that namecoin/ens/handshake/etc got virtually no adoption. but it has to be done eventually. the entire industry is a scam and rent-seeking with unlimited profit margins

Reply on news.ycombinator.com