Why was this done as an alternate root project rather than an alternate tld? I get it makes the project more useful (ability to register .johnsmith rather than johnsmith.bit), but it's going to severely increase complications when interoperating with the ICANN dns root.
what happens if you register .foobar on handshake, and then a few years later, ICANN delegates .foorbar? If you let the ICANN registration take precedence, all the .foobar domain owners on handshake side will lose their registrations. The threat of that will keep most people from using tlds registered on handshake. Why buy a domain on .foobar (handshake root) rather than .foobaz (ICANN root)? It might cost a few bucks more, but honestly I'd be willing to pay a few dollars/year more knowing my domain is secure.
Of course, it's possible that operator of the ICANN tld would give an opportunity for the domain owners on the handshake side to migrate over, but then they'd miss out on all the revenue on those premium domains. why allow the old owners of pizza.foobar keep their domain when you can resell it for $$$?
The project mentions that they have pre-reserved certain TLDs, but all that does is delay the inevitable. The first conflicts are going to be with yet-to-be-delegated gTLDs, since they're not in the current root (obviously), and they're not in the alexa 100k (while they're some sites with generic words as domains, most of them are squatted, which means they're probably not in the alexa 100k).
The only hope of this project surviving is if they gain critical mass and overtake ICANN as the most popular root. The network effect is insane with DNS (maybe even higher than with social networks), so unless there's a good reason for everyone to use this, I think this project will stay very niche.
A particular TLD (.bit) would clash with ICANN the same, unless someone would keep shelling $185k/y for keeping it up. This does not look very realistic. Registering a TLD is the only official way to interact with ICANN in this area, and I don't see ICANN making any concessions to an outright competitor. Even if registered, such a domain would make little sense: now every Handshake user would depend on ICANN again, hoping it will not hand the TLD to some other registrar (e.g. due to a failure to pay the yearly $185k). This sort of defeats one of the purposes of the project.
Not having a single traditional TLD at the end does have upsides. Any name with a long TLD immediately stands out as a Handshake name. Any reasonable person would register a domain very unlikely to clash with ICANN's TLDs. The lack of need to belong to a handful of TLDs allows to e.g. use dashes instead of dots, lowering the chance of a conflict: not joe.crypto.exchange but joe-crypto-exchange. (Of course people who want to squat short common words likely to be made TLDs by ICANN may do it at their own peril.)
Explicitly being at odds with ICANN forces the project to handle this outright, add a conflict-resolution policy applied at the client side: on a conflict, prefer which source at which domain? How to indicate a conflict anyway? There are no one-size-fits-all solutions here, but reasonable solutions should exist.
In general, I think the technical merits outweigh the risk of name clashes significantly for almost any reasonable user. (Unreasonable users will always exist; they should not be paid too much attention.)
A single TLD could reasonably be added to IANA's registry of special suffixes, since it wouldn't be part of the DNS hierarchy that ICANN is responsible for they'd have no claim on $185k or any other amount of money.
But a parallel hierarchy is never going to get that, so basically this choice ensures an up-hill battle, presumably mostly so that like other parallel hierarchies its proponents can make hollow claims about "owning" names that actually are meaningless, it's like buying land claims on Mars.
Main-net launch only 1 month away.
Other crypto projects should take note. This is how to prove you're serious.
7% going to contributors and 7% going to financial backers is a pretty big incentive. [0]
I’d rather see this set up as a non profit foundation or a community driven trust and run in an OSS way for the financial elements. As it is, I don’t think we should create a decentralized network with such significant financial incentives.
But they will have to re-build the user base and since handshake.org is literally giving away $10m to build it's user base, it might be difficult.
I think we are better off with some sort of community consensus protocol and the only benefit of giving away “$10m” is to gain even more money for the developers. Standards should be open or driven by a commodity cost model, not a “inventor gets rich” model. Their plan accounts for plans when the chain value is over $50B. That is unlikely, but it means there’s a model in the developers plans where $7B in value is held by the developers and investors.
DNS and other Internet standards never would have succeeded using compensation models like this. I can’t think of any RFCs that would have such payouts for the main contributors.
(I hope a project contributor is reading/commenting)
Q: Let's say I'm a representative of a company that wants to buy their name "example.com" to be resolved via Handshake. Assuming things are live and running well, what's the process by which we'd get www.example.com resolving to 123.123.123.123? (keeping it simple, not worrying about mx and srv records yet) How stable and safe is our record, assuming we owned the trademark for example.com?
With your private key you can also do interesting things like verify your subdomains with signatures ala DNSSEC or verify your own SSL certs without CAs.
The paper also mentions future improvements that could see each TLD using a side-chain (like plasma) to manage and possibly sell their own subdomains. This could also give each TLD owner more control over their own "consensus rules" for their particular TLD.
There are a lot more possibilities here, some are covered in the paper, many more are still to be explored.
Super excited for this project!
So of looks like this could also mean some changes in how we actually use the web, not just how DNS is managed.
How does this work after the handshake network launches?
If I register a new domain with ICANN, but do not register it with Handshake, can someone else? And if not, doesn’t that mean ICANN is still the central authority for domain names? (Including transfers)
It seems like the existing root zone & handshake will immediately fork, and then how will 3rd parties determines which root zone is correct? Doesn’t that still mean existing CA’s could simply update the root zone (regardless of handshake) (which is the existing problem with bad actor CA’s).
I’m probably missing something here, could anyone elaborate?
Its also mined, so give it a try!
How would someone 3 years from now have access to generate coins/tokens after the protocol increases the difficulty and stops generating coins so easily?
Wouldn't it be cheaper just to run a normal DNS server? What's the use case?
We already have https://www.eff.org/observatory, and anyone can run a DNS server for free.
If I could make a suggestion to the maintainers - I think it would be helpful to put the "project paper" in an additional format besides just the text file.
The handksahake.org site is really easy on the eyes but I found reading through a text file of this length quite a slog.
Guessing an insider on is hoping to exploit this for financial gain and control of this isolated DNS pool.
and why would users want to participate in a protocol which inherently relinquishes centralized accountability and responsibility, in favor of a security model that allows any of these mining warehouse operations run by anonymous robber barrons with enough excess capital to fill up an entire building with random number generating electricity wasting heaters?
Who thinks this is seriously a good idea for anything other then exploiting greater fools to sell digital beanie babies to?
