Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannoHung | Hacker News Reader

Sweet as hell. My only quibble is the idea of using the blockchain for validated naming. I think it'd end up in a landgrab which is nasty.

As much as we all hate DNS, having the ability to kick a squatter off someone's name is probably a good thing. Personally I don't think having a crazy hash for identification is a bad thing. Rather, what you need to do is just have some sort of reasonable personal contact book so you only have to deal with the crazy hash once (when you decide you want to remember that someone is who they said they were).

View on HN

These are just usernames, not trade marked domain names. What did you do when someone got to gmail/twitter/whatever before you did and picked the name you liked? You just picked a different name, or added some digits to the end of the one you liked. You could do the same thing here.

My experience has shown that having names be treated as unique identifiers is a hairy situation. And frankly, unique identifiers in a system for distributing source code are as important as domain names if not way more so.

Domain names only ever run code in an ostensibly sandboxed vm.

Unlike domain names they're immutable. So if it's good now, it's good as long as the private key is kept safe.

If you want to cross reference the identity with an email address you could use a keyserver. If you want to cross reference the identity with a domain name, you could use a TXT record.

Hmm. How about mixing and matching, like by having a DNS record with a special TXT record syntax, e.g. 'IN TXT "gt=yoursha256hash"'. That way you could find your destination via DNS and verify the hash in the TXT record against the blockchain.

Sounds like what ipfs guys are doing for naming:

> We plan to transition to hosting it on IPFS as soon as DNS -> IPNS -> IPFS naming proves robust, so we can use nice looking URLs.

http://ipfs.io/

I don't really understand the landgrab complaint: this costs $0.08 per username registered ($0.16 if you want to avoid races with miners), in comparison to centralized sites, which usually cost $0 per username registered. Why does this lose?

Centralization is about equivalent to ICANN being able to kick off a squatter. A truly decentralized system with first to register doesn't have a way to kick off squatters.

Well, the current ones don't, but it could. Decentralized networks just need decentralized decision, ie., you could have a process by which the majority of the nodes decide to kick off a squatter.

At which point someone uses a botnet to game the system.

It's a really good question and hopefully a good solution can be implemented. I always thought namecoin was onto something because whoever was willing to spend the most (run the most miners) got to control transactions, so market forces prevented excessive squatting.

Of course that has the downside that large entities grab all the good names and the little people are left with the leftovers.

Look at Namecoin, it is DNS via blockchain technology.

https://namecoin.info/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com