troquerre

Handshake has built-in mechanisms to prevent squatting. All TLDs are won through an open vickrey auction (if you win you pay the second-highest bid for the TLD). This prevents squatters from being able to easily buy up all the good names at once.

There is an issue though — the auction system gives early advantage in buying names for cheap. If only 100 people are buying names on day 1, they’ll be able to buy a lot of the names without competition. Handshake has a mechanism to prevent this. Names are released for bidding over the first year so that people who learn about it six months late can still register good names. The release schedule is basically a hash(name) % 52 to determine which week you can start registering any name.

Yes! It's funny you mention that I just bought The Sovereign Individual — haven't read it yet but from cursory glance I think there is a lot of intersection. Would love to discuss more — we have a discord I can invite you to if you're interested, just ping me at the email in my profile.

We're trying to improve the security of the Internet by replacing Certificate Authorities with a distributed root of trust.

DNS is currently centralized and controlled by a few organizations at the top of the hierarchy (namely ICANN) and easily censored by governments. Trust in HTTPS is delegated by CAs, but security follows a one of many model, where only one CA out of thousands needs to be compromised in order for your traffic to be compromised.

We're building on top of a new protocol (https://handshake.org, launching in 7 days!!) to create an alternate root zone that's distributed. Developers can register their own TLDs and truly own them by controlling their private keys. In addition, they can pin TLSA certs to their TLD so that CAs aren't needed anymore.

I wrote a more in-depth blog post here: https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-decentralizing-d...

The founder created vine which preceded tiktok.

Have you checked out Handshake? It's doing exactly what you're proposing — creating a decentralized, private, secure alternative to traditional DNS. I wrote an article diving into the security benefits specifically https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-decentralizing-d...

That's kind of what Handshake.org is trying to do, although instead of forking existing TLDs Handshake lets people register their own TLDs outside of the 1500 TLDs the ICANN has already provisioned. There have been many alternative root attempts in the past, but I think the only way for one to succeed is if it starts off by augmenting the existing system instead of making users choose between one or the other (that can come later).

You can also use alternative root zone projects like Handshake.org. Most people wouldn't be able to resolve it by default but if it's just for personal use it's trivial to set up a resolver for friends and family.

Given the trend I think this is only the beginning. We'll likely see increasing rent seeking behavior from ICANN administration since their power is effectively unchecked.

Handshake.org is another contender that's launching soon. I wrote a blog post exploring some of the security benefits of Handshake[1] which got a lot of discussion on HN[2].

[1] https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-decentralizing-d... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995969

Having spoken with people who have worked on the FB ads team, and having heard stories of how extensive FB's tracking is, this post seems disingenuous and personally I wouldn't be surprised if the account is sponsored by FB.

Agreed. IMO no organization should be able to collect rent on what’s basically public infrastructure at this point.

Handshake.org is trying to create an alternative root that is better (along the dimensions of security and governance) than the current system. I can see it gaining adoption especially in light of recent events.

They used rsync afaik.

Vitalik linked to our help article on Handshake's airdrop as an example of a proof of excellence alternative. It's ssl configuration was broken before but it's fixed now: https://help.namebase.io/article/4vchu01mec-handshake-airdro...

I mentioned Handshake in another comment. It has a good method for mitigating squatters. Names are won through a vickrey auction so they go to the highest bidder, and your funds are locked up for the duration of the auction (2 weeks) so it inhibits squatters from bidding on all the good names at once.

Handshake is trying to do exactly what you’re describing. It’s an alternative root of trust for DNS that uses a blockchain to secure names. One of the non-obvious security benefits is that you can store certs on the blockchain instead of relying on CAs, which is a source of failure in the security of the Internet today.

Browsing adoption is tricky, but people can point their DNS to Handshake resolvers pretty easily — it’s equivalent to switching to ‘S 1.1.1.1 service which many people already do.

ENS is more focused on wallet naming than DNS. Have you checked out Handshake? It’s aiming to create a more secure root of trust for DNS that’s resistant to seizure and censorship. We (namebase.io) are building on it ourselves.

https://handshake.org

You highlight an interesting point which made me realize that no one actually owns their domain names on the Internet. We’re all just renters.

You might be interested in checking out https://handshake.org which is trying to create an alternative to the existing ICANN system that is resistant to censorship and seizure. The technology is really interesting and we’re building on it ourselves.

We[1] are building on a new project called Handshake[2] which is trying to create a more secure (alternative) root of trust for domain names. It does so by storing certs on a distributed ledger instead of relying on CAs. Though this isn’t the main goal of the project, one of the benefits is that anyone can register their own TLD through a vickrey auction which is much more fair than the current ICANN system.

[1]https://namebase.io [2]https://handshake.org

Most YC founders were rejected multiple times before they got in. In my batch around 50% of the founders were previously rejected, which I believe is standard for most batches.

Creator economics frequently follow power law dynamics. The same can be observed for Shopify and Youtube creators. ie Substack's revenue is based off of how much their aggregate creator revenue is, not on the distribution of that revenue across their creators. So it's not that relevant to look at the average amount creators make.

Actually, it's better for these platforms to have the average be low bc it means they have exposure to as many creators as possible. The cost of supporting each marginal creator is basically zero so they want to maximize their odds of onboarding a creator that will be successful even if that means onboarding hundreds of unsuccessful creators to get them.

Agreed. The world is trending towards an internet that's split up between the different countries. There are some technologies that can counter that (ie check my bio) but it'll be an uphill battle imo.

Agree that shifting control from your state and ISP are beneficial, but centralizing DNS to one or two for-profit providers in the process is less than ideal IMO. I'm working on a project that's aiming to make DNS fully decentralized and wrote an explainer article in case you're interested https://www.namebase.io/blog/meet-handshake-decentralizing-d...

If it's not too revealing, can you share what country you're in?

Do you know how Cloudflare picked up so much market share even with 8.8.8.8 around?

A miner wouldn’t be able to do that. Only the private key owner of Google could do that. At most a miner could do a double spend attack (would cost a lot more than $2000), but that wouldn’t change the DNS record for Google.

The Innovators Dilemma provides a good framework for thinking through how it’s possible for new technologies to unseat incumbent network effects. Basically, the new technology needs to outperform the existing technology along a dimension that a new user demographic cares about, but that most existing users don’t care about. That’s how Instagram was able to gain traction in spite of Facebook, and Snapchat was able to gain traction in spite of Instagram. For Handshake, it can beat existing DNS along the dimensions of security and censorship resistance, which I think might be enough to give it a foothold to grow. But we shall see...

Handshake is currently in testnet and the auctions last a few days, but on mainnet the auctions last ~2 weeks. Names are open for bidding for the first 5 days, and then the next 10 days are for bids to be revealed.

In order to comply with US laws we need to verify people’s identity before they can buy/sell HNS, but fortunately it will be possible to register names without identify verification.

There is no way to do that via the blockchain itself. Theoretically, the community could hard fork Handshake to exclude certain names, but that’s unlikely as it’s antithetical to why the community would use Handshake in the first place. It’d be like if the Bitcoin community hardforked out certain addresses in Bitcoin...

Can you elaborate? It seems that you’re describing a problem that’s separate from secure naming and communication to servers.