Handshake: An experimental peer-to-peer root DNS

Interesting. I suppose it's only a matter of time until someone forks it and changes or lowers those incentives?

But they will have to re-build the user base and since handshake.org is literally giving away $10m to build it's user base, it might be difficult.

Because names are scarce and squatting produces inefficiency. Someone who wants to make productive use of the name has to pay a middle man in order to do it, which reduces their resources available to do the useful thing and unjustly enriches the middle man who has provided nothing of value to anyone compared to the situation where nobody registers the name until they have a use for it. (Or, if multiple legitimate users want the same name at the outset, compared to having an auction where money goes somewhere meritorious like paying the cost of maintaining the naming system instead of to the jerk with the fastest computer.)

Although one of the best ways to discourage squatting is to reduce scarcity. Have hundreds of TLDs (.cars, .bank, .farm, .repair, .plumber, .housing, etc.), or if you're not ICANN and don't want to pollute the global namespace with multiple TLDs then second level domains (.cars.bit, bank.bit, etc.)

Then a squatter has to register hundreds of times as many names and each name has hundreds of times fewer prospective buyers. Combine this with some nominal cost ($10/year) to holding a name, irrelevant to normal users but prohibitive to someone who wants to hold trillions of names hostage. And which you want to have regardless to be able to reclaim names that have been abandoned.

Technical merits aside...

Why was this done as an alternate root project rather than an alternate tld? I get it makes the project more useful (ability to register .johnsmith rather than johnsmith.bit), but it's going to severely increase complications when interoperating with the ICANN dns root.

what happens if you register .foobar on handshake, and then a few years later, ICANN delegates .foorbar? If you let the ICANN registration take precedence, all the .foobar domain owners on handshake side will lose their registrations. The threat of that will keep most people from using tlds registered on handshake. Why buy a domain on .foobar (handshake root) rather than .foobaz (ICANN root)? It might cost a few bucks more, but honestly I'd be willing to pay a few dollars/year more knowing my domain is secure.

Of course, it's possible that operator of the ICANN tld would give an opportunity for the domain owners on the handshake side to migrate over, but then they'd miss out on all the revenue on those premium domains. why allow the old owners of pizza.foobar keep their domain when you can resell it for $$$?

The project mentions that they have pre-reserved certain TLDs, but all that does is delay the inevitable. The first conflicts are going to be with yet-to-be-delegated gTLDs, since they're not in the current root (obviously), and they're not in the alexa 100k (while they're some sites with generic words as domains, most of them are squatted, which means they're probably not in the alexa 100k).

The only hope of this project surviving is if they gain critical mass and overtake ICANN as the most popular root. The network effect is insane with DNS (maybe even higher than with social networks), so unless there's a good reason for everyone to use this, I think this project will stay very niche.

They wouldn't be able to immediately route any TLD anywhere they'd like, but they could certainly screw with the network.

They would have to expend hashing power solving a previously solved block puzzle while continuing to build the blockchain off their new branch and ensure that its total difficulty is greater than any competing chain.

So suppose you immediately buy up TLD "foo", get a single confirmation on it, and publish it to your fanbase. The 51% attacker would be able to a) use their hashing power to publish their different solution to the block where your TLD got included, b) include their own purchase of "foo" in their alternate block, and c) continue building on their alternate chain to make it the canonical state of the transaction db. So your fanbase would look for "foo" and get the attacker's zone.

However, if we're five years into Handshake's existence and you hold one of the very first TLDs published in their blockchain, the attacker cannot immediately take over your TLD. They'd have to go back to the block where you made your purchase (or I guess when you renewed) and solve puzzles all the way up until the total difficulty of their chain exceeds the current canonical chain. Which they can do with 51% given enough time.

Also note that an attacker can begin/develop a 51% attack without publishing anything at all to the network.

Chrome already handles this: if you want the domain enter in the protocol - https://

If you want to search leave it off.

On top of that Chrome already has the ability to redirect you straight to the domain if it is well defined. I can't imagine it difficult to move that logic to google redirects instead.

e.g. "test.vm" goes to a google search despite being url format. "test.dev" goes to domain.