Hacker News Reader

Comment by whatisweb3 | Hacker News Reader

> it’s exceptionally useful that a stolen, infringing, or fraudulent domain can be recovered through the legal system.

Useful for who? It is often useful for large companies with powerful legal teams who will try to exert control over domain name registrars as they see fit.[1]

The nice thing with the blockchain is that you have the choice. If you want your asset to be recoverable through the legal system and courtroom decisions, it can be put into a centralized custodian. If you want to maintain complete ownership of that asset even though you risk not being able to recover it if somebody steals it from you, you might like to hold it non-custodially.

It is very possible that laws end up being defined around ownership of blockchain assets to give them a stronger degree of legal and intellectual property.

[1] https://domainnamewire.com/2022/03/08/meta-platforms-and-nam...

View on HN

> Useful for whom?

People who use DNS to resolve any service they rely on and expect to end up at that service, rather than on some hijacked version, which is essentially everyone who uses the DNS system.

Your linked examples are of companies attempting to put themselves beyond the reach of the legal system, which doesn't really counter the pervasive idea that crypto is only useful for breaking the law and for speculation.

Interesting you mention hijacking, only yesterday Curve’s .com DNS was hijacked and users lost funds as a result[1]. This is also possible with ENS but ownership can be secured more easily, two ways this could be approached:

1. ENS ownership is held by a 5-of-7 multisig. Attacker would need to socially engineer 5 entities instead of just one, Namecheap. Users can also clearly see when ENS ownership changes as it’s broadcast to the network.

2. ENS is set to a 100 year expiry and ownership records are then set to the burn address. Now, short of faulty RPC or frontends, there is no way that the domain can point to a different address.

My previously linked example was that of Meta entering into a court battle with a domain name registrar, who has full control over these records and may decide to alter them to avoid paying the cost of defending themselves in court. See [2] which is loosely related to this discussion of centralized services exerting control over name aliases. In a hypothetical blockchain application where usernames are secured with ENS or another smart contract, there would be limited recourse for anybody except the owner of these aliases to be able to transfer ownership.

[1] https://coingape.com/crv-tanks-over-10-as-attackers-stole-57...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/technology/instagram-hand...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com