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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

Will domains have to be renewed at all in the future?

When you put a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, it will stay there forever. You don't have to renew it.

Why not the same for domains? You put "mydomain > 111.222.333.444 signed: me, the mydomain owner" on a blockchain and as long as you do not put another signed message that overrides it, it points to 111.222.333.444 forever.

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Then certain domains would become impossible to change as soon as someone loses their keys or dies etc.

That's not a grounded argument.

What in the world are you talking about? That's the entire point of blockchains, to have immutable records. And short of forking the blockchain or breaking the underlying encryption, there's literally no way to transfer a DNS record (in a world using DNS built on top of a blockchain) without the private key.

> what in the world are you talking about

rebuking the implicit, "ergo this method is bad" part of your post, given its context. more specifically, the idea that its worse than current methods with DNS and X.509

The future is what we've built upon in the past. Domain names are not going to change in any significant way because the DNS system won the test of time.

there's a concept I like to bring up here, the Lindy Effect, that shows that DNS because of its longevity will likely be around for decades or centuries to come.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

ENS already mostly has this. depositcontract.eth expires in the year 2150 and cannot be modified or transferred until that point. Infinite expiry doesn’t really make sense.

https://app.ens.domains/name/depositcontract.eth/details

What would incentivise the creation/migration/maintenance of such a system?

Having a name system improves the UX of a bunch of products. Products want to provide the best UX so they would be willing to pay for it as without it their product will be worse.

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