Show HN: Bob – A GUI for DNS Record Management and Name Auctions on Handshake

To say the least, that is not normally how we manage and incentivize core Internet protocols.

I get that this looks very weird from the perspective of someone who’s been around since the early days of internet mass adoption. ICANN is basically a US-controlled bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are something that we’ve had for a long time and know the pros and cons of. And in fact ICANN has done a remarkably great job of what can only be described as a job from hell—coordinating the interests of a bajillion conflicting parties in one of the worlds most valuable digital assets.

That said, I hope you won’t write this off just because it looks weird. After all, the internet itself looked extremely weird for years (and arguably was at its most fun and interesting during that weird period.)

Handshake solves some real problems with the existing domain root zone system. Perhaps most interestingly to you, it trivially makes certificate pinning decentralized, and relieves us of the need to trust an increasingly obviously untrustworthy set of CAs. Further, it lets people hold domains anonymously, and creates something much more akin to actual ownership than the sort of “at the whim of the crown” perpetual renting that is available under ICANN.

Finally, handshake was designed from the ground up to be maximally compatible with the existing ICANN system. While we’ve identified serious problems with that system, we also have huge respect for it, and are well aware that for the near future Handshake’s usefulness will be very dependent on it being a “yes, and” rather than an “either, or”

Anyway, hopefully you can look past the novelty and weirdness of what we’re proposing and evaluate it substantively—your feedback would be immensely valuable

It looks to me like a lot of discussion about the viability/usefulness of Handshake itself, which I have no problem with; the post sparked a discussion, and that's cool with me. There are a couple of things about Bob I'd like to state, just so it's here for future readers, as I had hoped to answer questions about the software.

1. Bob is an electron application that also is a Handshake resolver and full node - you can find these projects at: http://github.com/handshake-org

2. We're looking for contributors and help of all kinds! Like any other open-source project, bug reports, suggestions, and contributions are very much welcome. Personally, my concerns as an engineer are around the scalability of the UI (electron can be hard to work with) when many (possibly hundreds) of domains are being watched or bid on. This is behaviour I believe is possible to see, from observing early internet domainers.

3. Like many non-custodial 'wallet' projects, it is meant to be a reasonable alternative to exchange custody, but we don't provide any guarantees as the user is responsible for self-custody. We intend to add hardware wallet support in the future. The goal is for the average person to have an easier time working with Handshake and Handshake names, by using Bob instead of a cli.

4. Bob is maintained by Kyokan, and I am the CEO there. It is not maintained by the Handshake team, and there is no Handshake foundation or business that runs the project. Kyokan is a separate software engineering consultancy that is working on multiple projects - we are also not a part of the Handshake team. Our contact info for security disclosures is in the repo.

5. Name Auctions and Airdrop claims on Handshake's mainnet start today (in under 8 hours), so it felt appropriate to share this repo, which we've spent a lot of time and effort working on. One can also find details about this in the repo, but we all hope you have a good time using the software!

Again, we're looking for feedback and suggestions. Even in the process of making this post, I found a few bugs, filed them and made minor improvements to the documentation. Thanks for reading!

Thinking about something and attempting to solve a real problem doesn't mean a solution has any inherent merit.

brb thinking about how to solve climate change and attempting to solve a problem by turning off my AC give me millions of dollars thanks.

Handshake didn’t need the VCs’ money, only their credible early stage project valuation. But Handshake had to accept the investment in order to make the valuation real, but then gave away all the money b/c they didn’t need it.

They hope it can serve as a better model for future ICOs, where a big chunk of the money goes to FOSS groups.