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Comment by 5701652400 | Hacker News Reader

this would work if we had free DNS. solving DNS to be trully decentralized and free is something for years I wish I had more time to work on and build

key properties:

1. everyone can be a registar. your localhost too

2. blockchain proof of ownership and discovery (certs, not proof-of-work, fast and cheap ledger)

3. everyone can be a CA (self-signed certs pinned in blockchain)

4. no fixation on static IPs (inspired by Cloudflare Tunnels, Tailscale). IPs are ephemeral.

5. blockchain/P2P discovery of domains

but it is all fantasy without real browsers support (Chrome, Safari). 99.999% of traffic is locked there, and both controlled by monopolies Google / Apple. and you cannot even build your own browser (Apple App Store will not allow it). Maybe alternative stores and some proxies / translation layer from normal web to this web would help.

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Zooko's Triangle says you can't build a name resolution system that's secure, human readable, and decentralised.

DNS is secure (in Zooko's terms - means you can be certain a domain only has one correct resolution) and human readable.

.onion is secure and decentralised.

Petnames (as in I2P) or /etc/hosts are human readable and decentralised.

Also any centralised secure system will quickly have all the names squatted if they are free. It's bad enough at current prices. For instance every dictionary word under .com is already taken. If they cost nothing it would be every pronounceable sequence of up to 12 letters.

Nothing is actually stopping you running "weird DNS" on your home network if you implement the DNS protocol towards clients. I suggest you get familiar with the program Unbound. It's very common for networks to use alternative DNS if only to address the devices on the network.

Also IPs weren't originally meant to be ephemeral. You can get an address block registered to you (v6 only of course, there's no more v4) for a pretty reasonable nominal fee.

You can’t build your own engine outside of the EU, but you can still build on top of the existing Safari engine. What you’re describing is technically possible.

However, why would a company build something just for a handful of people?

I guess if you are Epic games, and you do not want to be blocked or controlled by App Stores, or pay 30% paycut. maybe you would build and support independent (from google/apple monopoly) interenet stack.

or if you are EU/China and do not want google DNS and networkign layer owning entire EU/China

in all cases they would still want centralized control by each state/company.

how to align incentives of someone who can actually pull this off and still keep it decentralized is a big question.

so the only way to make this happen is independent SWEs build their own browser. AND significant portion of users will start use it exclusively AND it survives and crashes competition from OS controlled browsers (Chrome/Safari) AND OS does not block/remove them from OS controlled app stores (which they can and regularly do, just look at "Hey" or "Brave").

you got to go full own hardware stack. now only China can reallistically pull this off.

China has own hardward stack. (actually entirety of all hardware stacks. it is all build there). China has own playstores or higly regulated versions of Apple/Google play stores.

China has mini-apps ecosystem which is more resilient to App Store whims.

and pretty much China is only place that can reallistically negotiate and push back to Google/Apple.

nobody else can stand a chance.

so free web is only possible in China pretty much. and future of free web is there.

if it was up to corporate monopolies (MSFT, Google, Apple) they would shut down whole web and remove other browsers from OS they control, and be gatekeepers of entire internet unless govenrment threaten them break them up or block them.. oh wait.

exactly.

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