from Hacker News

Opera adds native support for blockchain domain names

by mrnobody_67 on 4/29/21, 7:04 PM with 153 comments

• by baby on 4/29/21, 7:59 PM

  Domain name/identity and key pinning has always been the only useful use of NFTs that I can think of.

  Today, to encrypt your communications with people, you use something like PGP or Signal which rely on "trust on first use (TOFU) but verify", in practice people don't really verify so it's more like TOFU. This means that if someone compromised the session at the moment where it was created (or re-created), then your communication are being snooped on.

  Today, to encrypt your communication to websites, you use HTTPS which rely on a vast network of certificate authorities. Any of these actors misbehaving leads to potential attacks. Because of that, the Certificate Transparency project was created to _potentially_ catch bad actors, that is if you check for your own domains regularly.

  Using a consensus-based registry, you can prevent (better than detect) attacks in both of these scenarios. Let people register their identity or domain name, and associate a public key to it that can be used to encrypt communications with the identity/domain, as long as the number of dishonest actors remain under a threshold no attacks are possible.

  The only (albeit not small) downside is that by taking middle men out of the picture, the naive approach prevents account recovery from happening. So to be practical, you need to find the right middle ground.

• by BLanen on 4/29/21, 11:20 PM

  Lose your key? Lose your domain, forever, for everyone, irreversible by any legal intervention.

  Yea, fuck that.

  Also, as with 99% of "smart contracts". The main contract which allows for updating the smart contract, and thus is ultimately in control of everything, is controlled by 1 private key. Nice "trustless". Just gotta trust this one entity never to make a mistake.

  Also, this has literally already been done at least 5 other times already before the "NFT" acronym was invented. Remember namecoin, anyone?

• by SheinhardtWigCo on 4/29/21, 7:50 PM

  All you need to know:

  > Will My Life Change?

  > Yes, my friend! It will because you can easily build your own decentralized website and simplify your cross wallet crypto payments, share music and photos (not just of my kids), start a business, secure and verify your identity “on chain”, or showcase your brilliant NFT art gallery.

• by nonameiguess on 4/29/21, 7:58 PM

  Why on earth do you want to decentralize personal belongings? I absolutely want my possessions centralized, in storage locations I own. That is the much more obvious solution than putting personal possessions on a blockchain. If you want to store digital tokens for your kids that you can be reasonably assured will still be there when they become adults, use thumb drives. Keep them in a fireproof safe if you're really worried. Somehow, my mom has managed to keep all the videos and photos of key events in my childhood safe and intact for 40 years without having to put them on a public distributed ledger. When betamax went obsolete, she transferred to VHS. When that went away, to DVD.

  I really don't understand what this woman thinks she is buying. I guess this is a better storage medium for precious moments and collectibles than sending copies of everything to gmail, but so is almost any other way of storing something.

• by cookiengineer on 4/29/21, 10:08 PM

  ...so they claim to be a consensus based registry, yet they block existing trademarked domains and are the only entity receiving money? How does that even hold up with their core argument that DNS is too centralized?

• by roachpepe on 4/29/21, 7:36 PM

  "It’s encrypted and hashed. It can’t be hacked..."

  It says so on the internet, so it must be true.

• by fastball on 4/30/21, 4:43 AM

  This isn't quite the same thing, but Brave has had support for IPFS[1] for a while, which I think is a pretty cool alternative to the ICANN-controlled TLD system.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

• by mrnobody_67 on 4/29/21, 7:05 PM

  Not sure about others, but I've paid thousands of dollars for ICANN renewal fees over the last decade... love the idea of "owning" real estate on the internet vs. merely renting it (and having prices go up every few years).

• by jsmith99 on 4/29/21, 8:15 PM

  More fragmentation. I use Nextdns for my router's DNS, which theoretically allows me to access any domains on the competing Handshake crypto protocol, but I've never actually some across any so far.

• by neals on 4/29/21, 9:50 PM

  I like the "speed dial" feature of mobile opera. I can't find a comparable function for mobile FF or Chrome. How do you guys switch between your list visited 10ish site on those browsers?

• by tomcooks on 4/30/21, 12:21 AM

  > Remember when the world wide web began? Many thought static pages were not that exciting (what the heck am I going to do with this?), and no one could have predicted all the use cases that followed! Purchasing clothes on your phone, real-time traffic updates, scuba diving weather forecasts, locating your ‘tweens around town. As we enter Web3, the same excitement exists…where will Web3 advancements and integrations take us?

  Take me back to the boring, reliable, niche internet and keep the use cases.

• by prepend on 4/29/21, 10:31 PM

  Where is this money going? How are these prices set? I looked up a four letter .com I have and it’s $2400. Why?

  Other domains aren’t available yet.

  NFTs for names is a really good idea but it seems like the novelty is in getting acceptance and trust. Not sure why a random org should get really substantial fees for names. For ICANN we’re forced to. But for a good blockchain solution the prices should be equitable.

  I understand that reselling goes to the owner, but this seems like a cash grab.

  That and many domains like common first names aren’t available yet.

• by walrus01 on 4/29/21, 7:59 PM

  People have been trying to make alternate-root DNS systems a thing for 20+ years, it has never caught on.

• by INTPenis on 4/30/21, 8:09 AM

  I've been using Mozilla, or Phoenix, for as long as I can remember but there was a period during 2004-2005 that Firefox used too much RAM on my 256MB laptop and I had to use Opera.

  At that time they had ads inside of the UI of the browser so I had to make a firewall rule to block those, but other than that it was a great browser in the pre-noscript days.

  But I've also heard some insider info from a Norwegian pal and apparently it's a disaster in that company. Only reason they're still alive today is all the embedded work.

• by russellbeattie on 4/29/21, 11:06 PM

  I was just looking at registering my name on https://ens.domains that give you a "decentralized" .eth address. The registration fee was like $10, but the gas cost was like $80. So I didn't do it.

  Ethereum needs to move to Proof of Stake ASAP.

  Edit: Also, it looks like this deal doesn't include ENS. I thought "unstoppable" was just being used as an adjective at first, but it's a company.

• by crazypython on 4/29/21, 9:56 PM

  Doesn't seem to support Handshake, .eth, or Namecoin.

• by space_rock on 4/30/21, 3:31 AM

  Reinventing namecheap with a scam layer on top

• by throwawaysea on 4/29/21, 11:14 PM

  I am not sure I understand the technology, but personally I like the idea of an immutable/unstoppable Internet as it is sold here. I am guessing that those with deeper technical expertise will be able to show that this is all just marketing and things are still ultimately, "stoppable", but the goals seem right.

• by terrycody on 5/1/21, 2:09 AM

  I try to register more than 10 domains, all with protection, but these domains are not copyright related, upstoppable domain use a sneaky word matching system to prevent you register a good name, oh thanks for this but no.

• by hellow0rldz on 4/30/21, 6:44 AM

  Dunno why, but IPFS seems such a kludge. Just share your static files in the distributed hash table and access those resources via their hash ID. Like... it's not much.

  This news is interesting as I wonder what happens if .crypto does become a TLD?

• by londons_explore on 4/30/21, 4:57 AM

  Notice that this doesn't use handshake names (the popular naming scheme from last year) or namecoin (the big naming scheme from 5 years ago).

• by kristianp on 4/30/21, 10:08 AM

  That reminds me: whatever happened to namecoin? That was one of the top cryptocurrencies about 8 years ago.

• by Zamicol on 4/29/21, 9:44 PM

  So there doesn't appear to be ENS support?

• by infocipate on 4/30/21, 3:30 AM

  That's a great news for opera lovers.

• by cobaltoxide on 4/29/21, 10:06 PM

  I had totally forgotten about Opera.

• by tpmx on 4/29/21, 8:35 PM

  Opera is beyond rescue. As someone who spent a decade working there it saddens me to say so, but please don't use it.

  Actual, executive day-to-day control over the browser tech has progressed sort of like this:

  1995: Oslo, Norway

  2008: Linköping, Sweden

  2014: Wrocław, Poland

  2020: Beijing, PRC (the sale happened in 2016, but they were hands-off for quite some time; I think they were being busy with shady fintech stuff in Africa enabled by the Opera Mini work we did mostly in Sweden a decade earlier: https://www.engadget.com/2020-01-19-opera-accused-of-predato...)

• by fs111 on 4/29/21, 7:33 PM

  So we need blockchain because google controls the emails of his kids that he has set up. What?

  If you want you data to be safe, then host your data yourself and make backups.

  Yet another "we had a blockchain and did not know what to do with it" solution that nobody needs.

  I think I lost IQ points reading this nonsense.