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Comment by dkarras | Hacker News Reader

because like most things blockchains (cl)aim to solve (primarily money and its transfer, but in this case ownership of domain names), those things do not really really have a centralization problem. 99.999% of the people do not, and do not need to worry about getting their domain name seized. cryptobros like to pose centralization as a huge problem where it really isn't so that they can peddle you scamcoins to pump and to feed their gambling addiction. "web3 based domain system" solves something that is at most a nuisance (and at best a necessary evil) by introducing massive problems into the equation, all to do something that isn't really a problem in practice (and it doesn't even do it, you admit there is still centralisation, so what did we gain by introducing all those problems, really?)

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See, this is just dogma that gets repeated on HN. It's obvious to any person who honestly thinks about it, that having a third party in control of your DNS (i.e. what IP addresses it resolves to) means that your entire site can be rugpulled from under you. If it becomes big enough.

For example: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/is-njalla-still-legit.1521...

Now, you can say, "most people don't care, they just have a small-time operation, just find a reputable domain operator who doesn't have a history of screwing people over." But that's exactly the use case for Web3 and blockchains in general. Why do you have to be forced to trust SOMEONE, with something as important as your brand / identity of your entire organization? And, for that matter, why should an entire community have to trust one guy who can change up the site at any time? That's not very secure, and many of you vehemently insist that no alternative should be made available, to anyone, "because scam"! You don't want browsers to even support it!

As your site gets larger and more people rely on it, you don't want to have that major point of failure at any point. I know that some people on HN go so far as to say that banks freezing your money, and ICE seizing your domain name, are very desirable features of the Internet. So, then don't complain about censorship and deplatforming. You can't have it both ways!

This just happened, for instance... ICJ officials are being threatened that their funds will be frozen: https://twitter.com/TomCottonAR/status/1781066997666607193

Some senator posting vaguely threatening shit on Twitter... yeah, the block chain will definitely fix that /s

Blockchain only shifts this problem one up.

You keep saying "your website" but any successful website will be "our website". There'll be an organization, company, community behind it. And now "the person(s) with the private keys" can rugpull it. Or do whatever they want.

Yes. Maybe A DAO could solve that. But that means everything, including domain names is in there from the get-go. Which isn't how this works on practice.

Blockchain technology is great for valuable assets owned by individuals. But much less so for groups and organizations that own valuable assets. And valuable domains almost exclusively fall under the latter.

The whole point is to NOT HAVE “a person with the private keys” to the entire database.

Each participant should be able to take only the actions as themselves, and affect a small part of the network. In aggregate they together effectuate the evolution of the network.

That is exactly the point — that we need blockchain software for entire communities rather than individuals!

Look at https://intercoin.org/applications

How does that help the organisation (community) manage their single domain?

For example: who controls the intercoin.org domain? I'm quite sure it's a combination of trust and hierarchy and as fallback a society with laws and lawyers and law-enforcement.

Which, IMO is "good enough" for nearly all situations.

As I have already said, with the current DNS system, that’s how it works. You have to trust that your provider won’t screw you over. It’s held together by duct tape and spit.

You know, in every OTHER technology, that’s how it was before we automated things that humans previously did. You may as well have said this about telephone switchboard operators, or tying up the line, until VoIP brought the costs to zero. “Who connects your calls? I’m quite sure paying $1 a minute was good enough for nearly all situations.” Except, when it all got automated and the providers turned into dumb hubs because open protocols eliminated the middleman. Where are these phone providers today? They provide the infrastructure only, and we route around problems. Same with blockchain.

Paying someone exorbitant amounts to “maintain your domain” because it is famous, and a hosting company to “handle spikes in traffic” etc. All that results in the need to extract rents from the ecosystem in ever-more-toxic ways, using toxic forms of capitalism:

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

But it gets worse than that. The externalities to our society of the profit protive and private ownership of public forums are immense, including widespread depression, tribalism evho cham and national anger reaching a fever pitch. All predictable. Take a look at exactly how it works:

https://rational.app

LAWeekly published an article recently about the steps I and my company have been taking for the several years to fix it:

https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/

Again, Web3 and blockchain is one possible way to do it but the keys to all the solutions are decentralization and open protocols! They remove the middlemen and oligopolies (like phone companies used to be, or the original AOL/MSN walled gardens) by making an alternative system not owned by anybody and with no single points of failure or control by a few people:

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/internet-worldwide-web-ne...

You have still not answered the simple question of who, within this web3 org, controls the (.org, or even the .eth) domain.

This is also a single person. Even on ENS, whom you have to trust. By moving everything onto ENS, you've, practically, not solved the issue of who controls your domain.

Sure. It mightn't be the ICAN. Instead, now, it's Jeffrey who has the private keys on his ledger. Congrats!

That's like asking "who, within Bitcoin, controls the Bitcoin network".

Each person with a wallet and private keys contains neither more nor less than what they are entitled to control. Smart contracts manage collective decision making.

You should learn about "abstract accounts", i.e. smart contracts on the blockchain being the owners of different things, and acting on behalf of multiple people. This is far more secure, there is no one private key that can leak, but rather the smart contract has business logic, that everyone knows what the rules are. It's like a constitution of a country.

If you wanted to point the DNS to another IP address, for instance, you could have a rule that requires a proposal to be made, and for people to have a chance to vote on it during a voting period, with vote weights being equal or proportional to how much of a token people hold. Votes could be delegated. I wrote about all this on CoinDesk in 2020: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block...

In fact, as more things become decentralized, the need to host a website at a particular IP address will go away, too. All of these Web 2.0 things are too centralized and prone to be rugpulled and changed, and the idea that someone must pay all the hosting costs is stupid, when even in 2004 BitTorrent participants also had to "seed" the same files they were "leeching". The reliability is actually necessary to the MEMBERS of the community who use it every day (exactly who you're talking about), rather than the LEADERS.

You can host static web sites on IPFS, for instance, and use smart contracts on the blockchain for business logic. That's what happens with NFTs, for instance, but that's just a first-generation technology, like the games Space Invaders and Pong.

Your domain name and the site it points to is not the end goal, what the site represents is.

Your domain name is one of the means to get more people to know about you or to deliver your product. Decreasingly relevant, note, as no one types domain names usually (people search).

As more people know about you via various channels (most centralized one way or the other: curated lists, social platforms, search), takeover of your domain name (or any other channel) becomes less of a risk. If you take Coca-Cola’s or Apple’s or Basecamp’s domain, they will barely feel it. Perhaps Basecamp could feel it, as it probably plays a bigger role in delivery, but I am sure they would have a procedure specifically to manage that risk.

99% of the time, if you run an ordinary %product%, should you worry that it will be you vs. the world and all of your channels are taken over? Currently, I’d say not. I could be wrong.

You have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to justify why web3 is not needed. Here you literally argue that one’s brand name recognition is irrelevant, and you can be constantly moving domain names with no impact to your bottom line or your community.

That requires more than just an assertion. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

> Here you literally argue that one’s brand name recognition is irrelevant

You argued that.

I argue the opposite: brand name recognition is what matters.

(And believe me, I am not the only one who makes that point and I certainly am not even remotely smart enough to have come up with it first.)

A domain name is merely one of the many things that may help you reach that recognition. These things evolve; domain names are less meaningful these days—an Instagram username runs circles around one—and all of those things are less critical the more recognition you achieve.

“If Coca-Cola were to lose all of its production-related assets in a disaster, the company would survive. By contrast, if all consumers were to have a sudden lapse of memory and forget everything related to Coca-Cola, the company would go out of business.” If you have your shiny domain name, but no one knows about you, you are as good as dead. If everyone knows about you, and your domain name gets taken over, you can’t really care less.

Obviously the domain is a large part of the brand.

It's like saying "1800 flowers" can rename itself. Or Jacoby and Myers had a phone number that was all 8's. And then when they split up, they got other numbers like 800-800-8000 but it wasn't the same.

People type in the domain name when they think of chess.com or whatever. You're using examples which are the most ubiquitous companies in the world that spend the most on brand recognition. That's not a great way to support your point!

Consider "basecamp.com" or "hey.com" -- would they do just as well if they had to switch every month to basecamp.nl and basecamp.io ? Probably not. And why should they?

Domain name is completely distinct from public awareness about you. They exist on completely different conceptual levels. It is a key distinction I suspect you are incapable of seeing.

A domain name is one of the means that together can help achieve that awareness and/or deliver your product.

It is like saying an airplane is “a large part of being in New York”. It is useful if you want to fly there, but once you’re there you don’t need it much. You can also drive.

> Consider "basecamp.com" or "hey.com" -- would they do just as well if they had to switch every month to basecamp.nl and basecamp.io ? Probably not.

Again, if you are specifically in the business of subverting the law and expect the world to turn against you and your domain is the main means of delivery then it may be wise for you to do something like this (or simply be a Tor hidden service with the same outcome). For any normal product this does not matter.

Incidentally, public awareness about the pirate bay did not really go down since their domain seizures.

> People type in the domain name

No.

No?

I do and people I know do.

You are way off. What do you think people do exactly?

> Again, if you are specifically in the business of subverting the law and expect the world to turn against you and your domain is the main means of delivery then it may be wise for you to do something like this (or simply be a Tor hidden service with the same outcome). For any normal product this does not matter.

Ah, that old chestnut! Yeah and you don’t really need end-to-end encryption, unless you’re a criminal who doesn’t want the government to find things out. Let them have the certificate so they can solve crimes easier and keep you safe! Same logic.

I type domain names sometimes, but generally I estimate 99% of people tap a link 99%+ of the time.

> Yeah and you don’t really need end-to-end encryption

I didn’t say you don’t need privacy, you are putting words in my mouth.

> Ah, that old chestnut!

The real chestnut are people who think the only way to go is to abolish institutions, grab a piece of land and guard it with shotguns and rocket launchers. A quick thought experiment would show that this is a dead end.

Many of the same mindsets and people who deride blockchain as “you dont need it if you are not doing anything bad” are also going to do away with end-to-end encryption under the slogan “you don’t need it if you have nothing to hide”.

After all, it can be used to hide ANYTHING, including 2 billion dollar transfers, tax evasion, money laundering and of course supporting terrorism. At least the blockchain is public! The sentiment you express comes on one side of the freedom/security spectrum.

If you’re arguing in good faith, then you’ll have to think deeply why oppose blockchain but others shouldnt oppose end to end encryption for the same reasons of “nothing to hide”. Even I come down on the side of “if you are reduced to sneaking around, then your society is already in bad shape” and consider end-to-end encryption to be a bandaid that makes people complacent. But the war on end-to-end encryption is actually far more prevalent than that around the world, and far bigger than your silly war on blockchains and mere cryptographic signatures (which governments don’t oppose nearly as much):

https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-en...

Read it! And no, the strawman is that I’m talking about shotguns. I’m talking about open software and protocols eating the world if capitalistic for-profit corporations, just as they disrupted the Big Telcos, and then AOL/MSN etc. So will blockchain be the value layer and IPFS/Autonomi be the storage layer etc. And the Web will be increasingly outdated.

End-to-end encryption can actually facilitate privacy. Blockchain is at best orthogonal to privacy, a public ledger generally undermines it.

As an aside, I don’t really get how a domain name connects to privacy. When I use encryption (including HTTPS) to communicate, the goal is to stay hidden and unknown. When I set up a domain name for my business, the goal is directly the opposite. Not to say there can be no reasons to advertise while remaining anonymous, just not sure privacy is a great parallel to draw.

Come on, more strawmen? First talking about shotguns, now privacy.

I didn't talk about facilitating privacy. You brought this up, in order to switch the subject to something end-to-end encryption can facilitate.

Blockchain isn't about privacy, it's about making sure that no one can control or man-in-the-middle-attack the network. People don't have to trust the middleman anymore.

You started talking about privacy by strawmaning with end-to-end encryption in your “chestnut” comment. Then you somehow brought in blockchain.

All of this is irrelevant or orthogonal to brand recognition.

I wasn’t talking about privacy at all. I was saying that your approach of “you have nothing to worry about if you arent doing anything wrong” is not very great, and it is exactly what is used by governments to fight against something you probably like more than blockchain and consider necessary, even though it can be used to facilitate terrorism. So you should take a look at whether you have double standards with regard to things you dont like vs things you like and think we need.

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