from Hacker News

Handshake – Decentralized naming and certificate authority

by 0xcrypto on 7/25/22, 8:11 AM with 95 comments

• by noname120 on 7/25/22, 12:25 PM

  > Email became Gmail, usenet became reddit, blog replies became facebook and Medium, pingbacks became twitter, squid became Cloudflare, even gnutella became The Pirate Bay

  How is that even remotely related to creating a new domain name service?

  Does the author really believe in good faith that the centralization of platforms would somehow be reduced or disappear entirely by introducing a new domain name service?

  This will literally not change anything. It's not because Facebook started owning facebook.com that they magically became a dominant platform.

• by mattwilsonn888 on 7/25/22, 2:46 PM

  The over specification of use case should be a big red flag. Any self-sustaining open and decentralized network capable of hosting a name service will be capable of pushing and storing arbitrary data around - the fact that data can have an owner is core to blockchain, so it's extremely dubious even without digging very deep that Handshake offers something you can't find in a more general platform.

  It is also worth noting that the coins behind this project have been mined since February 2020. https://e.hnsfans.com/blocks?page=6517

  Particularly for any use case where it is important that any user in all circumstances has access to data, it is really important to avoid centralizing forces present in Bitcoin and Ethereum - they were designed to secure blocks, not to secure open access, as plainly evident by their consensus mechanisms which do nothing explicit to reward the routing of data into the network.

  This results in sub-optimal outcomes for data routing, but optimal outcomes for producing hash power or collecting large staking pools. If you are seriously interested in a platform which incentivizes and is based around open access and leverages that to gain better security guarantees (time-stamping, public key cryptography, exchange of value) at scale than Bitcoin or Ethereum, read about Saito and its economic foundations.

• by p4bl0 on 7/25/22, 9:50 AM

  Another similar and interesting project, and which is not blockchain-based, is the GNU Name System: https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html

• by lekevicius on 7/25/22, 10:10 AM

  I think name servers is one of the best applications for a decentralized ledger. It _can_ work without a central party, and I think it might be better without one. Something like .org controversy might not have happened without a central party.

• by XorNot on 7/25/22, 12:33 PM

  God why is this blockchain? If I want to decentralize naming then I want to get away from IANA as the exclusive authority top down, but what it means is I want a reputation/selective trust system not some PoW trash.

  i.e. "are you my bank?" It's a question I want answered specifically, in a cryptographically secure fashion by my local government well-known authority, and then my bank.

  "Are you the local resistance leaders?" is a question I want answered by a chain of signed pseudonyms with set of revocations being published frequently through anonymous channels.

  In both cases, details like "how are TLDs assigned?" should ultimately be in my control, with a convention to establish "normal" practice.

  One of those use cases shouldn't be wasting my money running GPU miners, and one of them can't.

• by rvz on 7/25/22, 10:30 AM

  This is the only rare valid use case and need for a blockchain given the seizure of TLDs like what happened to .org [0] recently.

  It's very interesting to see Namecheap, Gateway.io, Encirca, etc use it and its very surprising to see some ICANN TLDs being claimed on Handshake.

  [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677

• by substation13 on 7/25/22, 12:13 PM

  Whatever happened to Namecoin?

• by whatisweb3 on 7/25/22, 11:46 AM

  Application-level protocols should not be attempting to secure their own consensus mechanisms - it ties the security of the application to the base token.

  If you are seeking decentralized naming and certificate authorities you can look at Ethereum and ENS. Besides the eventual transition to Proof-of-Stake, building an application on top of an existing consensus mechanism means that your application will inherit the security of that blockchain.

• by formerly_proven on 7/25/22, 9:26 AM

  More salient question than "is blockchain DNS a good idea": How did they get this domain name?

• by AndrianV on 7/25/22, 10:13 AM

  If I could change one thing about root replacement, it would be for a more efficient use of the hierarchical structure of the DNS. The attempt to cram everything into a namespace that is mostly flat is, in my opinion, essentially intractable.

• by lizardactivist on 7/25/22, 10:19 AM

  A very big security problem with current domain certificates is that browsers accept any certificate for any domain, as long as they trust the issuer. There is no concept or notion of who is supposed to have issued the certificate.

• by zokier on 7/25/22, 10:01 AM

  For root replacement the biggest thing I would want is better use of the hierarchical nature of DNS. Trying to squeeze everything into mostly flat namespace is imho fundamentally intractable

• by fabco on 7/25/22, 9:58 AM

  The problem they'll have is more and more TLDs are colluding with ICANN's, and Handshake chose to sell "TLDs", plus it is a proof of work blockchain.

  Dappy has a .d scoping at the top to avoid collisions, POS blockchain behind it, a co-resolution system (IP addresses and root certificates are always co-resolved), and it allows multi-ownership of names.

  Worth checking out https://dappy.tech/

• by kouteiheika on 7/25/22, 10:15 AM

  > Handshake uses proof-of-work mining

  Uh, no thanks. If you insist on using a blockchain at least don't make it proof-of-work. It's 2022, and there are plenty of production-ready non-PoW chains out there already. Please stop killing the planet.

• by daenney on 7/25/22, 9:47 AM

  > Handshake is a UTXO-based blockchain protocol which manages the registration, renewal and transfer of DNS top-level domains (TLDs).

  > The full node daemon, hsd, is written in Javascript and is a fork of bcoin.

  Personally, not the future I’m looking for.

• by eptcyka on 7/25/22, 10:21 AM

  The person who forced themselves into ownership of freenode is closely associated with this dumpster fire.

• by rajman187 on 7/25/22, 10:49 AM

  A very similarly named startup that seeks to help college students find their first opportunities

  https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/handshake-2

  Meanwhile, the claims on this website:

  > Email became Gmail, usenet became reddit, blog replies became facebook and Medium, pingbacks became twitter, squid became Cloudflare, even gnutella became The Pirate Bay

  While not even accurate, these centralized services became popular and synonymous with their underlyings due to convenience and benefits (eg gmail offering massive storage when it first rolled out; FB deploying its newsfeed which other social media platforms didn’t have at the time; etc)

  > True decentralization, no official singular Foundation, Committee, Corporation, or entities in permanent unitary control of the protocol.

  And what happens when something inevitably goes wrong without any kind of oversight? Who can course-correct if it has succumbed to say a 51% attack

  > Economic incentives enable decentralized agreements to form via a transparent name auction process.

  And so beholden to the same hyperfinancialization principles we see now—bid higher to get your blocks mined quicker. Not to mention the 700% spike in fees we saw not long ago.

  Add in proof of work and you’ve now got potentially very long waiting times as well, further incentivizing the pay for speed mentality

• by felixbennett on 7/25/22, 1:47 PM

  Why you all dissing HNS? Shit's awesome