Are namebase and handshake related? How is handshake.org different?
namebase is to handshake as coinbase is to bitcoin
Yep. And it's also a DNS registrar.
Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet
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Re: Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet
#32But how does this solve the problem of Trust on First Use?
Blockchains can safeguard the integrity of the data, but how do we know that painting in the real world corresponds to the token that purports to represent it? How do we know that business on Google really is that business and not a guy in their basement? How does Google or anyone really verify it, whether they are a top-down corporation or a blockchain or a decentralized project like OpenStreetMap?
Re: Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet
#33I love the idea but it seems like like a long shot to get the network effect working in your favor instead of against you. You mention a bottoms up approach and what happened in Catalonia but that is such a tiny percentage of the population facing problems that most people will hopefully never face. How does this go mainstream? Why should the average person care about a more secure solution to DNS? Most people happil…
There are many instances where an intolerant minority is able to get a neutral majority to adopt their will. Nassim Taleb describes this as the minority rule. It’s the same reason why all lemonade is kosher*
A small minority of people NEED censorship-resistant and seizure-resistant DNS, and the bet is that they can get the majority to adopt Handshake. The key is that Handshake is backwards compatible with existing DNS, so for the majority that don’t care, they can switch to Handshake without problem. I’d also emphasize that in addition to the minority that absolutely needs it, there are millions of prosumers who care about privacy and security as well, as evident by how quickly Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 has grown.
On the point of Cloudflare, 1.1.1.1 often gets a lot of usage in countries with strict DNS censorship. When Turkey took down twitter.com, people literally spray painted 1.1.1.1 on walls since you could use it to get around the censorship. OpenDNS got a lot of growth outside the US this way as well. In both the case of Cloudflare and OpenDNS, they can’t promote the censorship-resistant use case as strongly because they have a single IP. Handshake doesn’t face the same restriction.
Eventually, the goal is to get browsers to adopt Handshake in order to reach the late majority who don’t care either way, but that would only happen after significant bottoms up adoption. At a certain point it’d make sense for Opera and Brave to integrate Handshake, and then Firefox, Edge, and all the other browsers as well.
*https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Re: Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Author of the post here. My aim was to keep this post focused and cover the differences between Handshake and previous blockchain DNS attempts in a separate post. The keyword here is attempts: previous projects like Namecoin and ENS haven't really taken off. I think the reason has to do with the underlying technology and the go-to-market strategy (or lack thereof) of the projects. On the technology front, Handshake i…
I just tried to sign up but I got a message that namebase is in closed beta. How can I register?
Ping me at tieshun at Namebase and I’ll send you an invite!
(Anyone else who’s interested can do this as well!)
Re: Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet
#35Question to author: will it be possible in Handshake for the community to agree to censor a domain via a vote of some kind?
(FTR, I hope not)
Re: Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet
#36But how does this solve the problem of Trust on First Use? Blockchains can safeguard the integrity of the data, but how do we know that painting in the real world corresponds to the token that purports to represent it? How do we know that business on Google really is that business and not a guy in their basement? How does Google or anyone really verify it, whether they are a top-down corporation or a blockchain or a…
Can you elaborate? It seems that you’re describing a problem that’s separate from secure naming and communication to servers.
Re: Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet
#37Question to author: will it be possible in Handshake for the community to agree to censor a domain via a vote of some kind? (FTR, I hope not)
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...
Re: Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet
#38I love the idea but it seems like like a long shot to get the network effect working in your favor instead of against you. You mention a bottoms up approach and what happened in Catalonia but that is such a tiny percentage of the population facing problems that most people will hopefully never face. How does this go mainstream? Why should the average person care about a more secure solution to DNS? Most people happil…
There are many instances where an intolerant minority is able to get a neutral majority to adopt their will. Nassim Taleb describes this as the minority rule. It’s the same reason why all lemonade is kosher* A small minority of people NEED censorship-resistant and seizure-resistant DNS, and the bet is that they can get the majority to adopt Handshake. The key is that Handshake is backwards compatible with existing DN…
It’s true that a single static IP address is easy to block, but what is stopping an oppressive regime from building tech specifically designed to block Handshake? Correct me if I’m wrong, but Handshake still functions over IP and as such a government could potentially block all IPs associated with Handshake via similar mechanisms that are used to block a single IP. If there exists some kind of public list of all Handshake resolvers, as, from my understanding, there would have to be, they could very easily continue censoring content deemed inappropriate. I don’t see anything built into the core of this that will solve this problem. Oppressive regimes will adapt.
And DNS as it stands is fairly seizure resistant as long as you use secure passwords and the customer services folks don’t get tricked into resetting your account or something.
The vision is grand. I’m excited to see where this project goes and will definitely be following along. Best of luck.
Re: Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet
#39I love the idea but it seems like like a long shot to get the network effect working in your favor instead of against you. You mention a bottoms up approach and what happened in Catalonia but that is such a tiny percentage of the population facing problems that most people will hopefully never face. How does this go mainstream? Why should the average person care about a more secure solution to DNS? Most people happil…
Just make a fun website that is only accessible through the system.
Businesses can own a cryptographic asset (their domain name) that can accrue value based on services provided.
Potentially people may try to use their domains as collateral or experiment in collective ownership of public services through multisig or DAO like constructions.
Hopefully it helps push forward innovation on the chain of trust, opening it up to be something more configurable and dynamic.
Re: Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet
#40Blockchain solutions in real world work because of people's ability to form legally binding consortium made up of real business entities that have decided to cooperate with each other.
Crypto backed distributed trust that blockchain brings into such consortiums has no value other than superficial optics and hype novelty as of today. It doesn't solve any real problems that isn't already solved by legal mechanisms. To prove this, if you take away the legal mechanisms upon which the consortium is built, the consortium will fail and blockchain won't be able to hold it together.
For example, Bitcoin has value because masses trust they can convert it back to fiat currency via a coin exchange. Coin exchanges are real business legal entities that are subject to laws and regulations as they deal with fiat currency. For the masses, these laws and regulations are what confer that trust on those exchanges, not crypto.
It is best to think of bitcoin as a technical protocol but with very interesting properties, technical properties, and that has certain implications in real world – specifically w.r.t tampering and double spending or theft fraud. But this by itself has no real world value without the legal system backing its conversion to fiat currency. Without this relation to fiat currency, the technical properties are worthless on their own.
Similarly, handshake blockchain has no real world value unless a legally recognized consortium emerges to add value to it in real world.
Using bitcoin metaphor, instead of real world fiat currency it is real world names, trademarks that gets "converted" to digital names on this handshake blockchain that gives this blockchain any value. Once you have a trademark/realname "converted" on this blockchain, your ownership cannot be "stolen or double-spent" etc. That's the intrinsic crypto property of the blockchain which has some real-world value.
But this name "conversion" has to be done by "exchanges" which are real-world business entities to which laws can be applied.
Without this being baked into the system, this is dead on arrival.