GoDaddy Statement on Eth.link Domain Registration
aboutus.godaddy.net
aboutus.godaddy.net
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=ethlink-service-about-to-go... ("eth.link service about to go offline because domain owner is in prison")
> the project has found itself at the mercy of GoDaddy. Welcome to the decentralized web3 we've all been promised!
I admit this had me laughing.
Molly White is hilarious and that site is gold.
She’s (intentionally or not) done a bit of an homage to dealbreaker.com, which is roughly “Wall St. is Going Great” and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys the above.
Top kek.
Eventually, they will give up just like the other critics did and it will be on to the next one.
There is another group of people actively trying to profit either financially or in-kind via page views on the very thing they are calling destructive profiteering, and in the least generous possible interpretation, Ms. White falls into that category with this site.
But life is fucking hard at the best of times, and speaking for myself I'm generally much happier and more sane when I keep a sense of humor about things. Her site made me laugh, and was therefore a bargain at the ten minutes I spent chuckling over it.
Your "just a pointer" links already exists in a lot of places and you won't be able to update them all. In a few days who knows who will buy the domain and what will become of it, and where all these already existing links will point to.
Imagine if they put the same amount of effort into ridiculing old growth logging, strip mining, tax evasion, wealth inequality... literally anything but trying to dunk on some nerds playing around with cryptography to try and create a new trustless financial system.
This is why the problem solvers benefit the most in the early days, and why my early investments in ETH are still worth 3100% more than when i started even after the latest corrections. It is easy to recognize issues, but putting effort into actually doing something about it is where new developments actually occur.
Okay, this is really not what's at play here. I would highly encourage you to read The Politics of Bitcoin by David Golumbia, and will not participate further in this discussion with someone who has personal investments at stakes and who can therefore not be neutral and is already using fallacious arguments (no one said "broken link = broken platform", you're the one making this up) and ad hominem accusations.
Why? It's basically been like that since the days of Geocities. More broken links, more people go elsewhere to find what they are looking for, now you no longer have traffic because people know they can find the information in a more reliable fashion elsewhere, and now you fail because you don't have enough traffic and actual customers providing that traffic to keep business going.
.to is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of the island kingdom of Tonga.
Are you disagreeing with my use of "shady", or something else in particular?
.io is a shady ccTLD too, assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory.
I can understand why .io may be considered "shady" because it was assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory but the native people of this region didn't receive anything from .io.
I had to go back and look and yes, when Bitly was founded in 2008, Libya was still ruled by Gaddafi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_in_Libya
also followed the link and yes the government has seized one other shortening service which used .ly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitly#Alternative_domains
https://www.pcmag.com/archive/libya-seizes-url-shortener-vbl...
We can say it's different now or something but I wouldn't put money behind it.
Even some of the prominent critics, like Stephen Diehl are now grifting by pushing their books, preaching the same thing on their Twitter every day about the absolute and complete desolation of the crypto industry; which just isn't going to happen. Perhaps this individual in question is enraged by all of it and especially by Cardano which killed his private blockchain startup and is on an impossible mission to destroy all of it. (Won't happen)
Like many critics of crypto in the past, they eventually give up as they realize later on that they had wasted their time.
These people are beyond parody.
Due to money laundering regulations, that isn't really true anymore. Most banks straight up won't take cash deposits into someone else's account, identification or not. Other means (ACH, etc.) require KYC from the originating institution. I'm not sure about secure funds like a money order, but I'm guessing they'd be subject to some sort of verification as well.
https://docs.gandi.net/en/domain_names/renew/how_to_renew.ht...
> I read through the discussion area for that story and found that the problem had been tracked down to an outstanding invoice for passport.com at Network Solutions, the domain name registrar.
> I own a number of domains myself, including doublewide.net, so I'm no stranger to the payment system at Network Solutions. I went to the payment page at https://payments.networksolutions.com and typed in "passport.com", after which I was greeted with a page showing the outstanding invoice for $35. One of the buttons near the bottom of the page was "Make payment", so I pressed it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20031002153020/http://www.double...
> On Tuesday, December 28 I heard from Microsoft. I was happy to hear that the payment did fix Passport, and of course they wanted to reimburse me, and thank me.
With companies so lawyer-ed up, I wonder if that would be the case today. I'd be very hesitant before hitting submit in that payment page.
I don't remember exactly what happened after, but my immediate reaction was, "lol what? Why do they care about whether this is really Al? At worst, it just means some random benefactor is paying their own money so Al gets to see the PPV."
(IIRC he was paying cash too so there wasn't even an issue of CC fraud.)
I personally don't see a security issue with allowing anyone to renew any domain. It's not like you can change WHOIS information or the authoritative name servers -- you're just paying to continue with the existing ownership/configuration.
Until that day, it's reasonable for people to appeal to centralized Web2 entities to use their control to fix a problem inherent to centralized Web2 services.
Actually, I'd love for cryptobros to try to make a browsers on their own, just for the lulz. I'm guessing it fails at about... eh maybe they'll make a CSS parser before there's a rug pull on BrowserCoin
"If browsers had built-in Web3 functionality, the eth.link relay wouldn't be needed, and this whole situation would be moot."
The parent comment substantiates the claim, by citing Brave's ENS integration, and the lack of a need for a .link relay to access .eth domains when using it.
Cryptobros have this tendancy of being very obvious in their cult-like behaviour.
A developer going to prison, and a relay failing because he couldn't update the registration, is a far cry from a developer's signing keys being passed onto a malicious replacement who then includes removal of Web3 functionality in a browser update that users approve.
>>This seems like a far more catastrophic problem than losing control of a relay domain.
That's completely irrelevant, as the risk you describe is just as present in Web2. Risk is strictly reduced by removing the reliance on Web2 relays, the risk of browser hijacking notwithstanding.
>>Web3 boils down to "we've decentralised it, which is inconvenient, so you can find links to all of the decentralised bits in this one convenient central location, so just go there".
I mean that's what the early Web was like, with people going to centralized mainframe computers to access it. Any technology will take time to deploy, and its full benefits will be largely unrealized while it has low adoption rates and primitive tooling.
Owner deliberately created a bus factor issue and decided to violate sanctions against North Korea.
And yes, I am invested in the idea of not being dependent on a large corporation to authenticate my identity online, or a large bank to access my money. No surprise many people reject these ideas, given how many people's livelihoods now depend on institutions that are shaped around the existence of centralized points of control.
Just remember, the only way crypto/Web3 fails, is if a lot more people are put in prison, like the way the Netherlands put Alexey Pertsev in prison for publishing open source Tornado Cash code. Is that the world you want to live in?
This control they have has nothing to do with centralization or decentralization. They get it through the data-economy we live in - monopolistic companies syphoning petabytes of information about us to build impenetrable moats of data that smaller businesses can't compete with. Currency isn't even on their radar. It's irrelevant. When that cash or coin needs to be transferred into real tangible value, they'll be taking their share, regardless if the system that transaction is running on is an Pentium 3 AMEX COBOL server, or via the mining rig that came out last week consuming the energy from burning a small rainforest.
This has everything to do with centralization.. the exclusive access these companies have to vast troves of private data is a consequence of billions of people relying on a handful of companies to provide internet services to them.
If you say that decentralization is the solution, I'd retort "what are you even planning on decentralizing?", because most of their logistics isn't on "the internet", it's on the dark web
These sorts of disputes happen all the time. They don’t generally resolve with “contractor signs with counterparty’s name on new contracts in perpetuity.”
Seems inhumane.
Next on the crypto train is Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka government is warning against using crypto, but we'll see if the citizens choose it over their own Rupees.
Bitcoin seems like a poor inflation hedge to me.
However, it does seem to be working out well for them. Joke is on me, I guess.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/8/15/sri-lankans-make...
When it comes to ICANN, rules are rules.
Frustratingly, the critics and mainstream reporting[2] has misrepresented this as some failure of decentralization, ENS, or Web3. Or, they just don't know how the system works.
[2] https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=ethlink-service-about-to-go...
I think the problem people are calling out is that the system’s web2 bridge heavily depends on a centralized trust point. It’s not damning but you have to admit it’s somewhat comical.
The funny part to me is that they used godaddy as their domain registry... like were they not around for all the godaddy bullshit over the past two decades?
This problem was caused by the domain owner being in prison for helping North Korea evade sanctions. Perhaps some of these people do not have the greatest of judgement?
Yes, this is how it works. If you use DNS to access blockchain data you are routing through a centralized point that might fail like in the OP.
But the blockchain and ENS is unaffected, still as decentralized as ever, and anybody can query it’s data or build new providers on top of it. That’s how eth.limo, Infura, and others are able to provide infrastructure even when eth.link is down.
> depend on another external third-party whom you have no control over
This is how current DNS works.
In ENS, you can run your own node, or choose your blockchain node provider. Any platform building their infrastructure by permalinking to and depending on eth.link or another web2 service is setting themselves up for failure, and antithetical to the goals of web3. Thankfully most web3 users and services are not dependent on eth.link and recognize it is a centralized service.
I know that, nobody pretend it's otherwise.
> Thankfully most web3 users and services are not dependent on eth.link and recognize it is a centralized service.
If that were the case we wouldn't have a story here.
The whole point of "web3" stuff is systematically to make everything a tradable and scarce merchandise, so it seems a bit twisted to oppose it to what you call web2 based on this "rent-seeking" property. Concerning reliability, I think that we have more than enough cases of things going wrong to be able to strongly affirm that it cannot be considered a fair selling point for "web3" stuff.
[1]: https://domainnamewire.com/2015/10/09/wow-dropcatch-adds-300...
[2]: https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids...
One of them receives it and the others do not.
First come first serve.
Everyone competes to “catch it” but usually, the registrar gets it and auctions it off.
`whois eth.link | grep -iE 'Updated|Expiry|Creation'`
Updated Date: 2022-08-25T23:18:22.578Z
Creation Date: 2017-07-26T19:31:41.508Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2023-07-26T19:31:41.508Z
Godaddy claims that the domain expired, but the WHOIS record says otherwise. I suppose that someone could have made a payment that got the domain date extended, but then the payment failed. But wouldn't the record only be updated after the payment was confirmed?
And to that end, I've never heard of a registrar ignoring an extension and force-expiring a domain name. The whole thing is extremely confusing.
The Godaddy statement is dated August 25th, and so is the WHOIS record. The situation may have changed after the statement was made.
> I suppose that someone could have made a payment that got the domain date extended, but then the payment failed. But wouldn't the record only be updated after the payment was confirmed?
Payments sometimes bounce after they were approved (chargebacks, weird check stuff, etc), so there is a procedure to unrenew names.
Don’t make yourself a single point of failure. Always have at least two people who have admin access on things. Have emails go to a distribution list of at least 2, not to a single individual.
The only news here is not actually news. It’s the same way that organizations have been shooting themselves in the foot for decades.
We have learned nothing.
This website does not agree on the expiration date
AFAIK, this is the authoritative answer.
It also says Domain Status: autoRenewPeriod
.link is a modern gTLD, so its policies are set by ICANN†. ICANN registry policy says the domain automatically enters "autoRenewPeriod" status, it renews for a period (typically one year). But for a few weeks in this status the registrar (GoDaddy in this case) can delete the entry, signifying they don't want to actually renew it, and they aren't billed for renewal. So this lets them offer a "grace period" where eth.link doesn't work but when the subscriber notices hey my DNS entry doesn't work, they're told they can renew (possibly with an extra fee for late payment). GoDaddy also, as I understand it, uses the last few days of the ICANN policy window to run auctions, since you didn't renew but they have say on whether the name is deleted, the auction winner gets to just pay $$$ to have your name.
† Some older gTLS have their own policies, and the ccTLDs since they are operated by or on behalf of sovereign entities, well, sovereign entities have armies and stuff, they're not inclined to listen to a bureaucrat about what they can or cannot do, so they set their own policies, making your own rules is sort of the point of being a sovereign entity.
> Thursday 25th of August 2022
The linked post is from the same day.
Unsurprisingly the latter option which doesn't require messing around with network settings is quite popular, and so their decentralized domain system ended up centralizing around a conventional domain name owned by a guy who is unable to pay the bill because he's currently in prison for helping North Korea evade sanctions. Now the domain is about to expire and acquiring it is a crypto phishers dream since there are so many organic links to it in the wild.
Web3 capable browsers like Brave, etc, can access .eth domains directly. This site was for those that are still a bit behind on the web3 thing.
For a small but key piece of the 'decentralized' Web3 infrastructure to be controlled by a random stranger due to random events?
Welcome to the future, folks!
For all the technical effort put into this, one would have hoped some thought would be given to ensure appropriate custody of the eth.link DNS registration.
Or why you pay to have a telephone number
But, you will need to figure out where your million dollars a year comes from. Maybe you could require a renewal fee... oh, right.
And you'll need some mechanism to clear out useless garbage. For today's domains the renewal fee does that, but you don't want that fee, so... maybe you'll pay interns to look at each domain, weigh up whether it seems "active" enough and if not delete it ?
How does an intern guess whether some.example gets a lot of email? Sends a lot of email but with its return address listed? Is mentioned in Java package names for important software? Has a fun text adventure hidden in its DNS answers?
Oh they can't do all those things (and dozens of others I didn't think of) ? Then your service isn't fit for purpose or you must commit to keeping absolutely everything, forever, no matter what, which has unlimited cost.
You can also have the .com DNS servers see how often the domain is resolved. If it's not resolved for a year it should expire.
1) When the domain expires, it still remains active and still linked to the previous owner. People can still use it as normal.
2) When it expires, the price is set to a very high price for a few weeks. Anyone can buy it at the higher price. If no one buys it, it still remains active and linked to the previous owner.
3) If the previous owner wants to buy it back after it has expired, they just need to pay their original price (not the high price), provided that someone else hasn't already bought it.
4) At the end of the initial few weeks, the price drops a little and remains at this price for a few more weeks.
5) The price eventually drops to the regular price after many weeks.
6) At any time anyone can pay to extend the registration for another year.
I'm not sure I follow. Is there some previous godaddy history that I'm missing here and would explain such a statement?
They are not actually used, just parked.
fakecheese.info fastdoris.net old-banjo.org spacefare.rs
These weren't the results of me trying dozens of things, just writing whatever came into my head and none of them exist. Your definition of "any good domain" just means "Names which are obviously valuable" and then you're surprised that, duh, those names are obviously valuable so a speculator owns them.