Decentralized Naming and Certificate Authority

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As has been the pattern with all these decentralized DNS schemes, the FAQ doesn't cover the most utterly basic question: "I currently have one or more domains that I use extensively for my own life/work. How do I transfer those to try this new scheme? How much actual dollars/euros/yen/yuan/... does it cost, not mystery blockchain-whatevers but predictable real money? Does this new scheme harm me?"

Shouldn't an experimental system in particular want regular tech people with personal domains trying it out? We'd probably be more willing to give it a whirl (with fallbacks) since it's more for our own private use. But instead it's all about trademark holders and the Alexa 100k and so on, which is important too but it seems like most such domain holders would be a lot more conservative. And I've had a growing suspicion that the last part of the question doesn't get answered clearly because the answer is "you may get screwed, we are ideologues who think that people should be able to take your domain if you're not rich enough to defend it."

I mean, right now I don't in fact see the current DNS system as horrible. Cloudflare and others are pretty reliable registrars and companies to deal with. A .com is about $8, .net and .org both about $10. A known amount of $200 or so and I'm set for 10 years, and I consider that a good thing. I've had my domains for nearly 20 years now, they're core to my online identity and personal infrastructure. Same for most businesses, DNS sits at the center of everything. My concerns are about ICANN allowed price increases due to monopoly, and whether bad actors could somehow try to claim my domain and how I'd fight that as an individual. But I don't see answers in the FAQ to how this would help answer those. My personal domains aren't in Alexa top-whatever so it sounds like handshake will auction them off. There is a "renewal fee" after that but it's handwave-y:

>Renewals for names are annual and cost a standard network fee

A standard network fee of what? $1? $10? $100? It can vary by thousands of percent at random like so many cryptocurrencies? How long is the renewal window? Can it be paid upfront? What happens if it gets missed? Is any of this predictable?

I simply don't see any brass tacks implementation stuff here. It's a bunch of high level hoohah about the evils of centralization without any acknowledgement of how centralization can be useful and efficient too and how they deal with that. The word "federation" does not appear at all, which is another important approach/aspect. It sounds worryingly like a common "religious" approach where people take a tool (like decentralization) and turn it into a goal in and of itself.

Edit to add: your namebase.io FAQ seems a lot more useful than the handshake one. For starters it clarifies that there is a confusing terminology difference, where I guess the handshake people are using "domain" to mean "TLD" and "subdomain" to refer to what everyone typically calls a domain. So a core offering of this system appears to be a blockchain based replacement to the $150k+ (or whatever it is these days) "get your own arbitrary TLD" thing ICANN did, "anyone" gets to register their own TLD. But that raises more questions, like where the actual hardware behind all this goes particularly for existing TLDs which are blacklisted.