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Comment by chargingmarmot | Hacker News Reader

My belief is that blockchain-based solutions are typically inferior to centralized ones except when the goal is to evade regulation. (Crypto is good for dealing in contraband, dodging currency controls, and collecting ransomware; but it's always less efficient than centralized solutions with a trusted authority. And the only time you can't find a trusted authority is when you're trying to dodge regulation.)

In this instance, I don't see how this offers any advantage over the usual registrar-based DNS: at the end of the day I'm just using the ENS rootnode keyholders as my registrar, and I don't see how the blockchain is solving any problem that couldn't be more efficiently solved with a traditional database.

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"Evading regulations" is a phrase that holds a different weight when you don't live in a free society. "Evading regulations" could be using a gay dating app in Iran. Or organizing to fight against a repressive government in Russia. Even in so-called civilized Western nations, there are increasing tendencies toward autocratic rhetoric and encroachments into personal liberties. See: abortion access in the United States.

Not too long ago the US government put pressure on all financial institutions to stop processing payments for Wikileaks without them ever having been convicted of committing any crimes. That's just a single example plucked out of the sky, regardless of your feelings about that organization.

The great advantage that we get from a decentralized, opt-in trust infrastructure is that we have an avenue around these unjust and extralegal encroachments.

Having said all that, even if you don't care about politics, there are countless examples of centralized entities changing ownership, or changing strategies, and their users pay the price. See: Twitter taking people's usernames.

You might be fine with dealing with living at the whims of billionaires but I want my digital life to be more durable than that.

1. The first part here doesn't argue against my claim that "blockchain is only good for evading regulation", it argues that evading regulation is sometimes a good thing. That's fine, let's set that aside.

2. The second part argues about centralized entities changing ownership. I don't think the example of Twitter usernames is a good use-case for blockchain: there's nothing here that isn't already solved by public key crypto alone (which is how blockchain solves the problem anyway).

Maybe Twitter here is just an example and you want to talk about corporate control over payment services? I don't think this is a compelling argument. There's no shortage of payment services and even if one of them is bad you can always find another. Yeah: Stripe or your bank go out of business tomorrow, but switching to Apple Pay or a different bank is not a huge problem.

Corporate control over payments is a topic worth discussing but I'm talking about corporate control over identity. Twitter usernames are identities. Email addresses are identities. Phone numbers are identities. IP addresses are identities. Domain names are identities. All of those things are corporately controlled and can destroy businesses and communities on a whim.

I agree with you that public key crypto solves many of these problems, but you still need to publish your public key somewhere. And you need an infrastructure where public keys are first class citizens with the platform.

I gave ENS as an example precisely because it is open source digital public infrastructure where such things can be published forever, and it is not corporately controlled. It happens to use a blockchain to do consensus and create incentives for people to opt into running the public infrastructure. I personally think these game theoretical incentives are integral for the functioning of the platform but am not married to the idea if there are better ones.

Something like Ethereum is an anti-authoritarian platform. You don't use it unless you desire the qualities of anti-authoritarianism. For everything else there's centralized solutions.

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