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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that requires servers and electricity.

so to offer it for free means somebody has to subsidize it. letsencrypt can operate because big companies with lots of money want their ads to be delivered without being intercepted by an ISP. what's the motivation for anybody to subsidize free domains?

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> running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that requires servers and electricity.

I guarantee you I can store and make available over DNS the less than 1 KiB of data for less than a penny a year.

Instead of free, charge a flat $1, put it in long term US treasuries at 5% / TIPS at 2.5% and you’ve covered your hosting costs forever. The principle will never need to be touched.

okay, so why aren't you doing that. if you can offer domains for $1, you can undercut all the existing players by a huge margin. that's a big opportunity, no?

You would need to pay the ICANN fief

Everyone would get a subdomain and so you only need to pay for 1 TLD.. that's <$20US/year.

How about DNS on a blockchain?

https://docs.ens.domains/learn/protocol/

Supporting DNS all up should be possible but organizing the other decentralized services (compute, storage) is the hard part

The name service is easy, namecoin did it more efficiently than ENS a decade ago.

The decentralized services need not be attached to some blockchain due to the resource constraints. But there are examples like Filecoin and such.

Aka DNS where if you lose your passphrase (or get phished) you irreversibly lose control of that domain.

But the tradeoff is that it’s free right?

They already work in Brave too or for other browsers if you install a webextention.

That sounds like an unnecessarily overcomplicated nightmare.

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