Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

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Matrix, Jabber and IRC all rely on DNS, domain registrars, registry operators, TLS certificate issuers and ultimately ICAN themselves, and it has been proven[1][2][3] time and time again that they're as trigger happy and as unreliable as any other centralized platform, which is in fact what they are.

Unlike "consumer" platforms like Discord, they're used to talking with serious businesses, and usually have more sensible rules and customer support procedures in place, but things still can go wrong sometimes.

This is one of a very few things that can actually be solved by a blockchain (because there's no way to have a human-friendly naming system without financial incentives, and there's no way to have decentralized financial incentives without a blockchain), but that causes its own share of problems. Your domain might be impossible to take away, but if you get hacked and your keys get stolen, there's also no way to get the domain back.

It seems that no matter what you do, this is just a risk you're going to face.

IRC doesn't rely on DNS, nor really effected by the other issues you mentioned.

Connect via IP and you can connect with no issues. Self-signed certs work well for IRC too.

Lol. These discussions are often with people who don't know shit. Like fair point.

p2p matrix (arewep2pyet.com) doesn’t depend on DNS.

Unsure why a distributed ledger like a blockchain would be needed for DNS independence :)

Because you need some way to find communities/users. You can either do it the TOR way (AKA give everybody a keypair and treat base64-encoded public keys as addresses / handles), but those addresses aren't human-friendly and are hard to remember.

You can go the DNS way and have a centralized registry. It may be hierarchical and/or distributed, but it's fundamentally still centralized.

You can go the free-for-all way and allow anybody to register any handle/domain under any public key. This works for closed networks with trusted participants, but on an open network where name registration is at no cost, a profit-seeker will inevitably register all the names for themselves and try to sell them, probably at somewhat extortionate prices.

The only way to deter profit seekers is to introduce a small cost to register and maintain a name. You need fees to be high enough for most names to be unprofitable to snatch, but low enough to still be affordable to a vast majority of users. The only way to collect fees in a decentralized manner that we know of so far is via a blockchain.

The crucial realization here is that, with a human-friendly naming system, there's always going to be a cost to acquiring a name. It may come from the designers themselves or from the people who got all the names in a gold rush, but it's always going to be there. The cost doesn't necessarily have to be financial, many centralized system require scarce resources (e.g. phone numbers or human attention to solve captchas) to squat on.

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