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Handshake – Decentralized naming and certificate authority

handshake.org

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Re: Handshake – Decentralized naming and certificate authority

#51
> 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.

Re: Handshake – Decentralized naming and certificate authority

#52
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.

Re: Handshake – Decentralized naming and certificate authority

#53
post #29

> 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.

> It's 2022, and there are plenty of production-ready non-PoW chains out there already. Yeah. Like Solana, Polygon, Helium, Celo, etc? Which they went down. Why would something that operates like a CA, DNS or TLDs be suitable on those 'production-ready' chains? PoW makes sense for this use case. > Please stop killing the planet. I agree. I'd rather have something useful burning the planet and is an improvement than s…

> I'd rather have something useful burning the planet...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Re: Handshake – Decentralized naming and certificate authority

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very unfair to namecheap: 1. The search bar on their homepage returns no handbrake results 2. To get to those results in the first place you have to click on a 'Handbrake' tab (leaving the 'Domains' tab) 3. The search results link to an info page that clearly states "It's also important to note that handshake domains do not resolve in regular browsers without additional setup." For the record, I think Handbra…

> The search bar on their homepage returns no handbrake results That's sadly not correct. https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?doma... For example using "beast mode" on the front page search, a good portion of the domains are "handshake" entries with only a tiny little (i) button to distinguish them from actual domain names which could be used in the real world. I can add them to my cart with no ot…

[deleted]

Re: Handshake – Decentralized naming and certificate authority

#55

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.

How would that work? Add another DNS record? It would have to be out of band as the server cannot be trusted (see HPKP), and DNS itself could just as easily be MITMed as an HTTPS request, often even moreso.

Ultimately I suppose it would have to involve some pre-shared key. It could be made tolerable with a browser addon holding entries for critical websites. But maybe the mentioned CAA has already solved this.

Re: Handshake – Decentralized naming and certificate authority

#56
post #25

> 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.

PoW makes sense from a first principles approach [1]. I don't see Handshake growing into a trillion dollar network, so the security budget won't be that big, therefore I don't think it will be very energy intensive. Furthermore, if you calculate the economic impact of DNS hacks, the net impact of a decentralised PoW DNS implementation could even be positive. Wrt to non-PoW system, so far governance for those chains l…

small PoW networks are prone to takeovers. E.g. one actor decidea to use his asics to take over the network for a few blocks.

Re: Handshake – Decentralized naming and certificate authority

#57
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's 2022, and there are plenty of production-ready non-PoW chains out there already. Yeah. Like Solana, Polygon, Helium, Celo, etc? Which they went down. Why would something that operates like a CA, DNS or TLDs be suitable on those 'production-ready' chains? PoW makes sense for this use case. > Please stop killing the planet. I agree. I'd rather have something useful burning the planet and is an improvement than s…

> I'd rather have something useful burning the planet... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Except that the examples I listed after more than 10 years of operation, especially the use of Deep Learning and training on tons of new data, have NO efficient alternatives, and still require tons of data centers to the point where some of them literally caught fire and their use is worse for society. Unless you want more surveillance, spyware, etc who would be happy with that?

The end result to all that wasteful training is that it doesn't work or it gets tricked or confused by junk input. Proving to be a waste of energy, time, money and the re-training, fine-tuning process has to be done repeatedly if there is an error, or everyday on new data.

Either way, it is pointless to outline a comment as 'This is a false dilemma' without countering my claims as I have both recognised the wastefulness of decentralized blockchains like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Doge, that are much worse for their intended purpose (payments) etc and using tons of data centers for Deep Learning / Machine Learning training, re-training, fine-tuning, etc everyday on user data which benefits surveillance capitalism, spyware uses etc which that is also worse for everyone.

Re: Handshake – Decentralized naming and certificate authority

#58
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW makes sense from a first principles approach [1]. I don't see Handshake growing into a trillion dollar network, so the security budget won't be that big, therefore I don't think it will be very energy intensive. Furthermore, if you calculate the economic impact of DNS hacks, the net impact of a decentralised PoW DNS implementation could even be positive. Wrt to non-PoW system, so far governance for those chains l…

small PoW networks are prone to takeovers. E.g. one actor decidea to use his asics to take over the network for a few blocks.

This is a solved issue with Merge mining. Here a primer: https://blog.bitmex.com/the-growth-of-bitcoin-merge-mining/
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