Can Namecoin obsolete ICANN (and more)? | Hacker News Reader

Can Namecoin obsolete ICANN (and more)?

theumlaut.com

141 pointshoggle86 comments

Article author here. Just wanted to add that if any of you work for companies that send engineers to the IETF, there is an Internet-Draft RFC that would normalize the use of several P2P pseudo-TLDs such as .gnu, .zkey, .onion, .exit, .i2p, and yes, .bit, which is what Namecoin is squatting on. Would be great to see everybody supporting it.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-grothoff-iesg-special-use-p...

I'll plug BitShares DNS--a Namecoin competitor I am working on--here: http://nmushegian.github.io/dns/

Whitepaper and FAQ are not quite up to date but you get the idea. From: https://github.com/nmushegian/dns/blob/master/whitepaper.md#...

- Namecoin issues new coins to miners as a reward for performing merged mining with the Bitcoin network. The namecoin supply is being inflated at nearly 30% per year for several more months, then over 10% for the next several years. Domainshares only ever shrink in supply, when fees are destroyed as implicit dividends.

- Namecoin attempts to service multiple namespaces at once. .p2p is highly specialized for servicing the .p2p TLD namespace. The use case is the same as Namecoin's "d/" namespace, which is used for the .bit TLD.

- Namecoin's name registration price is fixed at any given time and is independent of the name itself. Domainshares utilizes an auction-like mechanic to incentivize price discovery for names, making sure the final owner pays what it is actually worth. The majority of the final cost will have gone to the network as dividends by the time the auction is over, with a small fraction having gone to bidders as a reward for price discovery.

- As a result of the fact that domains are expensive and there are dividends on shares but not domains, there is a high opportunity cost to squatting: holding a domain without making good use of it.

  Domainshares utilizes an auction-like mechanic to 
  incentivize price discovery for names, making sure 
  the final owner pays what it is actually worth.

How would this work for, say, google.com ?

We are still working on the exact mechanics (open to suggestions!), but the simple first model is:

- The price starts at 0 and people bid it up to the market value

- If someone makes a bid B1, then someone makes a next bid B2 = B1 + D, then person 1 receives (B1 + D/2) and the remaining D/2 gets paid as fees to network (and thus become shareholder dividends)

- This incentivizes people to bid up the price to what they consider the market value, because of the extra portion they receive when they are outbid

- This also disincentivizes squatting because you will pay more for buying and selling the domain than you would have received as network dividends had someone else just bought the domain

So if I buy a cheap unused nonsense word domain (say wikipedia.org) and turn it into a valuable domain by making a popular website many people visit and link to, 'the network' gets to shake me down because wikipedia.org is worth $20,000,000 now instead of the $20 I paid for it?

And as an end user, I don't know if visiting or e-mailing wikipedia.org will take me to an encyclopedia or a cybersquatter or a porn site?

Who exactly benefits from this system, except for 'the network'?

Not sure what you mean exactly but it works like that : Once you buy your domain at 20$ is is yours and you do whatever you want with it. The bidding auction applies only the first time you buy it nobody can touch your domain name one you purchased it.

We should talk: http://stackmonkey.com/blog

I like it

I expect it will obsolete ICANN as effectively as AlterNIC, New.net, OpenNIC, etc.

The technical fact that it is blockchain-based really doesn't make much difference as it's incredibly unlikely to be adopted worldwide, due to the network effect of the already-established domain name system.

The telegraph, MySpace, and AOL had network effects.

It's a hurdle, but it's not insurmountable. The question is whether namecoin provides anything sufficiently more appealing to all players to overcome that headwind...

As it stands now, a domain name owner in the current system probably has more risk from domain hijacking than authoritarian censorship.

So the main feature of Namecoin - to provide a censorship-resistant, cryptographically untamperable set of domain name records - is also its biggest disadvantage, as recovery of any stolen domain names is entirely up to the goodwill of the thief.

This reason alone would make it very unappealing for most domain name owners, because as well as going against the established domain name system, it must also break societal expectations of redressing thefts through legal means.

"So the main feature of Namecoin - to provide a censorship-resistant, cryptographically untamperable set of domain name records"

And the above means zilch to the majority (let's pick an arbitrary 95%) of domain name owners (source: I am intimately involved in this business since the start and deal with these owners)

Do people seriously think that the millions of existing domain name owners are going to undo years of marketing effort for something that they don't even need? Local restaurant for example has no issues with censorship at least with respect to their website.

I agree. It may have a solid use case in providing name services alongside existing anti-censorship, anonymised networks like Tor and I2P, but for mainstream use Namecoin provides no benefit.

It's an interesting experiment though.

I am using namecoin to resolve bittorrent sync secrets in my distributed browser Syncnet:

https://github.com/jminardi/syncnet

It was fairly easy to integrate

Why not use the open source Clearskies instead of BTSync?

https://github.com/jewel/clearskies

AFAIK Clearskies does not have a working implementation yet.

Did you intend to link to a repository of markdown files?

I don't know anything about the project but it looks like there is a working implementation of the protocol in ruby in that linked repository (just not in the master branch).

There is also an in-progress c++ implementation of the protocol in a different repo [1].

Even so, it's pretty clear that the thing isn't ready yet and even states that it shouldn't be used for anything other than test data.

[1]https://github.com/larroy/clearskies_core

Stupid question: does resolving a Namecoin domain name involve downloading the whole blockchain or is it handled by third party servers?

Related question: Is there a Bitcoin wallet where the blockchain resides on a server and the client is only used for signing transactions, with the server never seeing the public key, ever? That would be pretty damn useful.

There are several. Electrum is the most popular desktop one.

I love you.

Second. All you have to do is to use DNS server supporting .bit domains

Doesn't that defeat the point?

Not necessarily, see my responses to the same question here:

- http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/227t7x/can_name...

This is interesting. Could the static HTML files connect to decentralized databases?

Almost certainly if there were a decentralized database that exhibited bitcoin / namecoin like behaviour.

Development has slowed to a crawl, but http://datacoin.info is still alive. It focuses on redundancy, as all participants have a full copy of the database, and so data amounts are small (1 datacoin = 20kb). Still, there's a potential use case there for text-only content.

Definitely looking forward to distributed storage apps; other projects in progress include BitCloud, MaidSafe, and Ethereum.

Participating in Datacoin sounds legally dangerous. All a miscreant needs to do is include into its blockchain some files that are illegal to possess, and everyone is potentially in trouble.

It would be like this, but worse: http://www.dailydot.com/business/bitcoin-child-porn-transact...

Such link could be sent with a bank transfer too - I don't think you could then claim the bank holds and spreads the links to child abuse. Or could you?

That's an interesting scenario, and I don't know how much distinction is made between possession of illegal material and possession of a means of instantly retrieving it.

Datacoin has the storage capacity to include the actual images as part of the blockchain though, not just (probably quite ephemeral) links to such.

Check out http://maidsafe.net. I think it does that.

I have been looking at *coins for a while and the implications of the blockchain-based concensus system are interesting.

The system really maps the real world onto computers very well, in that it reduces what used to be technical issues to "political" issues. These systems work on concensus, and as such, require a significant amount of interested parties to work in the expected way. They are very much subject to network effects that only occur after critical mass is reached.

Namecoin, in particular, was subject to a major security issue last year: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ohyom/fatal_flaw_i...

Blockchains are being used to implement solutions to different problems, and they could really solve some significant problems such as decentralized identity and reputation management (!). The difficulty lies in creating a significant enough "currency" so that miners will become involved and make the blockchain stable and reliable.

Bitcoin is a currency in a much stronger sense than namecoin or any other of "not-really-money-coins" around. I wonder if piggybacking on bitcoin might actually be the solution for this situation (i.e introduce other information in the bitcoin blockchain instead of using a brand new one).

Sadly, adding external information to the blockchain could be construed as "spamming the blockchain" and therefore not deemed worthy for inclusion in the bitcoin blockchain by miners. So there is a big challenge there.

If you are interested in this topic and want to work on related projects feel free to reach out (google my username).

> Blockchains are being used to implement solutions to different problems, and they could really solve some significant problems such as decentralized identity and reputation management (!). The difficulty lies in creating a significant enough "currency" so that miners will become involved and make the blockchain stable and reliable.

Author of the original article here. Namecoin is actually merge-mined with Bitcoin, so miner participation is not a serious problem. There's no way you could have known that without happening to know that, though, and I agree that this is an issue for a lot of new blockchain-based technologies.

Maybe I've misunderstood it, but how does merge mining create an incentive to mine namecoins? I figured all it did was make it "cheaper" to mine namecoins by "reusing" work done for the bitcoin blockchain. In order for the namecoin network to function, you still need to actively get involved with it.

Here's some information on merge-mining for anyone else involved: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merg... http://dot-bit.org/Merged_Mining

Most of the major Bitcoin mining pools also mine Namecoin. The current Namecoin hashrate is around 60% of the Bitcoin hashrate. http://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-btc-nmc.html

Well, that's a lot! I didn't expect it to be significant compared to the bitcoin pool.

Do you know how that came to be? i.e how did they convince everyone to start mining namecoin? Or was it just good timing WRT bitcoin?

Merged mining has good incentives since it basically gives free money; for the same work of mining Bitcoin you can mine Bitcoin and Namecoin simultaneously.

I'm not too sure. A lot of people in the cryptocurrency community are saying that something like Namecoin is going to be the second major blockchain-based technology after payments, so maybe it just got the right kind of press at the right time, as you say.

Another interesting article on that topic:

"Enter The Blockchain: How Bitcoin Can Turn The Cloud Inside Out"

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/22/enter-the-blockchain-how-bi...

What I'm interested in the most would be a new way to do Email. P2P and secure. I can't believe that most of us are still sending Email unencrypted but then again can you really blame us? PGP has failed not only in its main use case (trust in people, really?) but most of all in terms of usablity.

Note that you can use namecoin blockchain with your DNS and HTTP tools with dnschain [0]. Check this out:

$ dig @dns.dnschain.net okturtles.bit

$ curl http://dns.dnschain.net/d/okturtles

Both of them will resolve to whatever info is stored in d/okturtles domain.

With the (soon-to-be) DANE support (for those who forgot: DANE is about distributing TLS keys through a channel you trust (it comes from the domain you're visiting) but that is not the same as the final application (it's DNS, not HTTP/SMTP/IMAP/XMPP/etc), so you can prevent MiTM), I don't see what's missing technically to have our own internet.

[0] https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain

> DANE is about distributing TLS keys through a channel you trust

Only to the extent that you and your visitors already have to trust your DNS provider, your domain registrar, the TLD registry, and the DNS root. Neither DANE nor DNSSEC intrinsically solve anything that hasn't already been solved for end users... particularly when you consider forwarders will have to accept unsigned zones for years to come.

Namecoin etc does go some way to "squaring Zooko's triangle" (as many good minds have discussed already) but proof-of-work chains have their own burdens, and are not any more immune to the lure of trading robustness and security for convenience than traditional DNS forwarders, online DNSSEC signing, or webmasters offering up their SSL certificates up to CDNs.

> Only to the extent that you and your visitors already have to trust your DNS provider, your domain registrar, the TLD registry, and the DNS root.

Which is not something I want to do, hence my push for namecoin :)

> proof-of-work chains have their own burdens

Do you have more information about how it can be detrimental to namecoin, specifically distributing DNS information ?

Do namecoins have to be renewed or are we going to have old good domain names infinitely unavailable because someone forgot their key ?

They have to be updated around every 36,000 blocks (about 250 days), or else you relinquish the name. It can be just a "touch" update, no need to change the information.

Do you have to pay the 0.01 fee to update?

Can I register google.bit, facebook.bit, apple.bit, oracle.bit, and microsoft.bit for a total of $0.25? Can they do anything to get it back?

No, you could not register those names. Because they are already registered.

They could ask very nicely for ownership of them, or perhaps send you a court order depending on what country the both of you were located in. But unless you provide them with the private key or fail to renew your registration... nobody should ever gain control of any .bit domain.

A Kraken.com dev looking into the namecoin code found a flaw and declared on the Namecoin blockchain that "Namecoin died October the 15th 2013, coinslayer" by re-writing the DNS values for the very first .bit domain ever registered (which is bitcoin.bit).

The flaw allowed for some people to "steal" domain ownership, but a patch was put through and everything is back to normal now. As far as I know, all domains are back in the hands of the original registrars.

This link shows the entire debacle taking place: http://explorer.namecoin.info/n/1

Okay, so right here you've got a reason why namecoin won't be adopted. There is a critical mass of many, many memorable names. These organizations already have them in the current system; don't have them on the namecoin (since someone likely is squatting on them) and, as you say, have no reasonable way to gain them w/o paying extortion.

Due to network effects, namecoin won't replace ICANN without making it better for all those organizations; and due to the core nature of namecoin, it won't be better for them.

> No, you could not register those names. Because they are already registered.

Who are they registered by?

You can explore the blockchain here: http://explorer.namecoin.info/

So we don't actually know who the owner is, if the best information we've got is a blockchain lookup?

They can offer you a large amount of Namecoin to get it back.

Does namecoin have an operation for transfer which wallet is bound to the key,value pair? Or do you need to transfer private keys off blockchain?

Yes, you can transfer names on the blockchain.

Given the news around bitcoin one could imagine that stealing 'google.bit' out of the google wallet[1] would be a pretty lucrative target.

[1] No I don't really think Google would let that happen but Bob's Bakery Buns might and it could cost him his business.

Bob's Bakery Buns isn't likely to pick a web address that - at this stage - requires potential visitors to his site to download a plugin to find it. I'd be interested to see what percentage of major brands' .bit addresses become owned by the brands rather than squatters. If the latter percentage is sufficiently high you can pretty much guarantee that fear of phishing will make browser vendors very wary of seamlessly integrating .bit resolution into the standard browser build.

How long does it take to resolve a namecoin key=>value pair? Considering the variable speed in these sorts of decentralized networks, is there a noticeable lag when you initially request a .bit website?

Just as fast as a DNS lookup. It can be cached anywhere (even locally, with your own name server on your own machine).

It's also almost exactly the same as DNS regarding name changing. You have to wait about 10 minutes for the blockchain to register a name, and then about 24 hours before all the cache servers update it.

The blockchain is only used as an authoritative source. You don't really look up names in the blockchain, you use a vanilla cache for it.

Sure, decentralized networks can have variable speeds, but you could put a caching layer in front and the problem should be solved, no? The writes will be variable, but reads don't have to be.

It's very fast, and if it's not fast enough, one can build an optimized data structure in another program.

All the blockchain is local. The time taken to resolve a key->value pair is the time your software takes to decode information from your disk; it's nothing compared to DNS.

Change propagation, on the other hand, is as long as blocks can travel from peer to peer.

Hmm - if your ISP has a good DNS, and has a cache hit on your DNS request, versus if you have to seek your HD, the DNS might be much, much faster.

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_laten...

Round trip in same datacenter: 500,00ns.

Disk seek: 4,000,000ns.

You have to lean on the numbers pretty hard to make the DNS faster, but it's possible it could be faster than your local disk.

Pretty sure the intersection of the set of people who worry about DNS performance and the set of people who are still running servers exclusively off spinning rust is nigh-vanishing...

The broadband connection usually has latency depending on the protocol. ADSL2+ with data interleaving can be as high as 32ms. DOCSIS has at least 5ms for the first hop too. And that assumes your ISP's (or whichever) DNS server is close from a network perspective and that it has enough power to instantly send a reply down the wire.

To me the real problem with namecoin for the purpose stated in the title of this post is that it doesn't emphasize delegation to near the degree necessary to achieve it. The current implementation is much more like the older name system in that it requires the list of canonical names to be distributed as widely as possible.

There is a reason the root nameservers only delegate the act of name lookup at the top level. It's just not practical for them to have a complete list, and it's not even particularly desirable for users of it to have their list of names completely public (think internal servers).

It is possible to name a delegate nameserver through namecoin, I believe, but last I looked it was a bit iffy and it doesn't require any kind of authentication of results from the delegated nameserver a-la dnscurve.

The realistic use case is to use a tree-structure similar to the one we have, then use namecoin as verification.

Why do we asume that domains have to be 'unique' like trade/brand names? I have a name, shared with my grandfather, father and son; in the right context, you would never confuse one for another. Furthermore, my name is shared by probably thousands in my country; again, I have never been confused with any of them. So, if the whole point is to translate human readable (and memorable) words to IPs, and in the event that the DNS returns more than one result, can't the browser display a search-results-like page letting one know there are options? Wikipedia does it and that is THE descentralized knowledge store of the planet. Maybe if I type homes.com I mean local homes first, like Google rankings, but is ok if someone else is using homes.com elsewhere.

Think about it...

Does Jon Postel's ghost decide if I want local or non-local homes when I send email to bob@homes.com?

Side note: Wikipedia is NOT the decentralized knowledge store of the planet. There is nothing decentralized about wikipedia.

Has anyone created an easy to use name coin registration system so non-technical people can register names?

It seems like that would be a good opportunity?

There is https://dotbit.me/ , but who knows how reputable that site is? Just as Bitcoin needed something like Coinbase, the Namecoin ecosystem needs a web wallet with reputable backing.

I guess not necessarily even a wallet.

A non technical user shouldn't even have to own or even know about name coins.

They simply want a way to register a cheap, non-censorable domain, right?

I'm imagining someone would make a service that offers that.

So, what happens if your domain gets hijacked?

Domain hijacking is impossible without access to the private key that controls the information written in the blockchain concerning that domain.

If somebody gets your private key, they can "steal" your website away from you, sure. Just don't let anybody access your private key.

As hopeful as people may be, humans don't surround themselves with the best security. Sure, stealing it without the private key may be impossible, but stealing the private key can be very possible.

So, your answer is - if your domain does get hijacked, then you're out of luck unless you pay the hijacker? That's a serious flaw.

Most people don't want their technical infrastucture to be immune to law enforcement, just the contrary.

That's not my answer.

That's how Namecoin works.

Namecoin is just a name/value store system. That's it. It might not be perfect for DNS but it's being used for other things like https://onename.io right now.

The public can choose to use it in it's current implementation or build a better way of dealing with domain hijacking should they so choose.

Sure, it has a wide variety of niches which it fits greatly, and where it can be successfully used - but if anybody considers it as a solution to obsolete ICANN, as the original article proposes, then it's an entirely different ballpark than being just a name/value store; and rather different criteria for success.

"(...) the cryptographic-decentralization Zeitgeist makes it an exciting time to have and use names"

Yes. Very true. For anyone interested in the above statment i'd highly recommend checking out http://twister.net.co/ - a decentralized micro-blogging spin-off of bitcoin. Unbelievable innovation is happening!

Why is it called Namecoin and not something like Bitname or Bitdomain?

That's just the name that the original founding coder (vinced from the bitcointalk forums) chose and nobody has wanted or bothered to change it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6017.msg88356#msg883...

Some chose to refer to it as the dot-bit project as well.

I have never seen any arguments over the name.

namecoin == nmc == dot-bit

Namecoin encompasses more than just .bit names.

MeowBit is system service for Windows which allows for resolution of dot-bit domains across all applications. http://meowbit.com

Could we just get rid of naming authorities all together? Why not just let trusted listing agencies handle it and users can simply pick the one(s) they wish to use. For instance, let's say I want to publish a website under the name "sony". Okay, that's fine, but it's going to get a lower priority then the offical Sony, Inc. site b/c any listing agency is obviously going to serve up that site when a user puts "sony" in their browser's address bar. However, a user could opt for an alternate listing agency --maybe one the offers no commercial listings, and then maybe my site would come up through them. Browsers could make it easy to switch between listing agencies and prioritize them.

This is already possible with the current DNS system. The listing agencies are commonly called "DNS servers" and they may chose to disregard the authoritive DNS servers. End users can typically list which DNS servers they want to use by order of priority within their OS/browser DNS settings.

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