Domain name/identity and key pinning has always been the only useful use of NFTs that I can think of.
Today, to encrypt your communications with people, you use something like PGP or Signal which rely on "trust on first use (TOFU) but verify", in practice people don't really verify so it's more like TOFU. This means that if someone compromised the session at the moment where it was created (or re-created), then your communication are being snooped on.
Today, to encrypt your communication to websites, you use HTTPS which rely on a vast network of certificate authorities. Any of these actors misbehaving leads to potential attacks. Because of that, the Certificate Transparency project was created to _potentially_ catch bad actors, that is if you check for your own domains regularly.
Using a consensus-based registry, you can prevent (better than detect) attacks in both of these scenarios. Let people register their identity or domain name, and associate a public key to it that can be used to encrypt communications with the identity/domain, as long as the number of dishonest actors remain under a threshold no attacks are possible.
The only (albeit not small) downside is that by taking middle men out of the picture, the naive approach prevents account recovery from happening. So to be practical, you need to find the right middle ground.
I think this just shifts the responsibility and point of attack onto the owner (which is true for all decentralized crypto). An attack is still possible and worse yet, it is completely irreversible.
That said, the option of taking personal custody and responsibility is important and I think it should always be an option.
> Today, to encrypt your communication to websites, you use HTTPS which rely on a vast network of certificate authorities.
This fact has been irritating me for a long time. Because no one should believe that every single certificate authority is tolerant to any attempts to steal the private keys. But that is exactly the underlying assumption behind HTTPS being the only way to use HTTP in a more secure manner than exchanging in plaintext.
Let's think about this scenario: Suppose that I built a web service for my personal use and hosted it in public cloud. I don't trust any certificate authorities, so I created my own TLS certificate without using them. I installed my own certificates on the machine from which to connect to my web service. Now the server for my web service is serving in HTTPS using my own certificate. Am I safe? No. Because any entity with access to the private key of any of the certificate authorities trusted by my machine, is capable of intercepting the communication between my machine and my server, simply by MITM.
The problem of being forced to trust certificate authorities can be solved by adding the feature to embed a public key in a url. For example, it would be wonderful to have a url like httpsecure://rsa:PUBLICKEY/example.com/ to make sure example.com always responds using the key PUBLICKEY. IIRC, the Tor onion services is an instance of this -- the .onion domains include public keys.
Lose your key? Lose your domain, forever, for everyone, irreversible by any legal intervention.
Yea, fuck that.
Also, as with 99% of "smart contracts". The main contract which allows for updating the smart contract, and thus is ultimately in control of everything, is controlled by 1 private key. Nice "trustless". Just gotta trust this one entity never to make a mistake.
Also, this has literally already been done at least 5 other times already before the "NFT" acronym was invented. Remember namecoin, anyone?
If I lose my ssh key I lose access to any data on my server, too with no recourse and we are fine with that.
It's a trade-off but some people can take care of their keys and prefer that risk which they've covered over a risk that a third party can take control which they can't cover. It's fine if you are not one of those people but not everyone has your needs.
> Yes, my friend! It will because you can easily build your own decentralized website and simplify your cross wallet crypto payments, share music and photos (not just of my kids), start a business, secure and verify your identity “on chain”, or showcase your brilliant NFT art gallery.
Why on earth do you want to decentralize personal belongings? I absolutely want my possessions centralized, in storage locations I own. That is the much more obvious solution than putting personal possessions on a blockchain. If you want to store digital tokens for your kids that you can be reasonably assured will still be there when they become adults, use thumb drives. Keep them in a fireproof safe if you're really worried. Somehow, my mom has managed to keep all the videos and photos of key events in my childhood safe and intact for 40 years without having to put them on a public distributed ledger. When betamax went obsolete, she transferred to VHS. When that went away, to DVD.
I really don't understand what this woman thinks she is buying. I guess this is a better storage medium for precious moments and collectibles than sending copies of everything to gmail, but so is almost any other way of storing something.
> my mom has managed to keep all the videos and photos of key events in my childhood safe and intact for 40 years without having to put them on a public distributed ledger
No offense, but in all likelihood no one is attempting to counterfeit or pirate your Mom's videos and photos of your childhood, and ownership/p2p ownership transfers are not material.
There are almost infinite real world examples were ownership records are benefited by blockchain technologies over centralized services. Take property deeds, usually kept and recorded at the County level, there is almost endless fraud with people filing forged quitclaim deeds on a daily basis. That would be an example of a public record, but their are private record keeping examples such as stock certificates. Usually the "Dole" case is the most famous example, where you have a publicly traded company with all the benefits of corporate record keeping, stock trusts and banks, and centralized stock exchanges, but when the buyer went to take it private low and behold the public company with all the centralized safe guards in the world should have had a total capitalization of 36M shared but somehow had about 49M share issued, it only ended up in $150M in damages, but this could not have happened using blockchain and most agree nearly every publicly traded company likely would have the same inconsistencies.
...so they claim to be a consensus based registry, yet they block existing trademarked domains and are the only entity receiving money? How does that even hold up with their core argument that DNS is too centralized?
Hi, i read your comment from January 2020, where you said you had a t440p working with 32gb, ram, i wanted to ask you how did you were able to do that since t440p is for default blocked at 16gb. thanks
This isn't quite the same thing, but Brave has had support for IPFS[1] for a while, which I think is a pretty cool alternative to the ICANN-controlled TLD system.
Not sure about others, but I've paid thousands of dollars for ICANN renewal fees over the last decade... love the idea of "owning" real estate on the internet vs. merely renting it (and having prices go up every few years).
From the docs it seems like you can "hardcode" IPs or...a traditional dns cname.
At $40/domain, if you update your DNS records once every two years, you're really only just breaking even.
Also, from the FAQ:
> Trademark holders with proof of ownership can apply to claim ownership of trademarked names. If a trademark name has already been sold, then it will be refunded. Note - this process ends once domains have been distributed. Unstoppable Domains does not have the ability to move a domain once distribution has occurred.
Seems like a less-than-agreeable policy for most folks. Unless you're a scalper.
More fragmentation. I use Nextdns for my router's DNS, which theoretically allows me to access any domains on the competing Handshake crypto protocol, but I've never actually some across any so far.
I like the "speed dial" feature of mobile opera. I can't find a comparable function for mobile FF or Chrome. How do you guys switch between your list visited 10ish site on those browsers?
> Remember when the world wide web began? Many thought static pages were not that exciting (what the heck am I going to do with this?), and no one could have predicted all the use cases that followed! Purchasing clothes on your phone, real-time traffic updates, scuba diving weather forecasts, locating your ‘tweens around town. As we enter Web3, the same excitement exists…where will Web3 advancements and integrations take us?
Take me back to the boring, reliable, niche internet and keep the use cases.
Where is this money going? How are these prices set? I looked up a four letter .com I have and it’s $2400. Why?
Other domains aren’t available yet.
NFTs for names is a really good idea but it seems like the novelty is in getting acceptance and trust. Not sure why a random org should get really substantial fees for names. For ICANN we’re forced to. But for a good blockchain solution the prices should be equitable.
I understand that reselling goes to the owner, but this seems like a cash grab.
That and many domains like common first names aren’t available yet.
I agree that the prices seem arbitrary and high, but since there's no central authority competition could drive the prices down. Eventually I think we'll get to a Let's Encrypt level of service and all of this will be free, as I don't see a technical reason anyone should pay more than the transaction costs.
The high cost does prevent abuse though, as squatting would be a bigger nuisance than it is with traditional DNS if registration were cheap/free.
There are only so many viable combinations of 4-letter domain names... $2400 seems pretty fair compared to what .com's of the same length are going for (50K-$1m+ for random 4 letter combinations)
I'm not a blockchain fan but "somebody tried this once and it didn't work" is hardly a dismissal of an entire class of ideas. Beanz didn't catch on but bitcoin seems to have.
Blockchain technology only became popular in the last decade and, as much as it has become a meme at this point, DNS is actually one of the best use cases for it. The current DNS is distributed, but highly centralized, and paying renewal fees for keeping a record in a file and a server running feels like extortion. An immutable, consistent and decentralized storage system solves those issues, and I can pay once and technically own that record for life. (Though Unstoppable Domains' prices seem arbitrarily high...)
So I'm hopeful that some of this new tech can disrupt the current system, which we know is inherently flawed.[1]
While I'm not going to use Opera anytime soon, we should celebrate this news and push for other browsers to do the same.
What annoys me is that there is no easy way to change DNS servers. Try on IOS, or Android and you'll find it such a hassle being hidden within other scary network settings. Windows you need to click through five different features and not forgetting that DNS is an alien word to most. Try and explain it in the simplest of ways such as "a phone book for computers" you've just bored the subject to death
I use OpenNIC and know how to navigate around my router. However for my mother, that's a whole different story.
I've been using Mozilla, or Phoenix, for as long as I can remember but there was a period during 2004-2005 that Firefox used too much RAM on my 256MB laptop and I had to use Opera.
At that time they had ads inside of the UI of the browser so I had to make a firewall rule to block those, but other than that it was a great browser in the pre-noscript days.
But I've also heard some insider info from a Norwegian pal and apparently it's a disaster in that company. Only reason they're still alive today is all the embedded work.
I was just looking at registering my name on https://ens.domains that give you a "decentralized" .eth address. The registration fee was like $10, but the gas cost was like $80. So I didn't do it.
Ethereum needs to move to Proof of Stake ASAP.
Edit: Also, it looks like this deal doesn't include ENS. I thought "unstoppable" was just being used as an adjective at first, but it's a company.
I am not sure I understand the technology, but personally I like the idea of an immutable/unstoppable Internet as it is sold here. I am guessing that those with deeper technical expertise will be able to show that this is all just marketing and things are still ultimately, "stoppable", but the goals seem right.
I try to register more than 10 domains, all with protection, but these domains are not copyright related, upstoppable domain use a sneaky word matching system to prevent you register a good name, oh thanks for this but no.
Dunno why, but IPFS seems such a kludge. Just share your static files in the distributed hash table and access those resources via their hash ID. Like... it's not much.
This news is interesting as I wonder what happens if .crypto does become a TLD?
[+] [-] baby|4 years ago|reply
Today, to encrypt your communications with people, you use something like PGP or Signal which rely on "trust on first use (TOFU) but verify", in practice people don't really verify so it's more like TOFU. This means that if someone compromised the session at the moment where it was created (or re-created), then your communication are being snooped on.
Today, to encrypt your communication to websites, you use HTTPS which rely on a vast network of certificate authorities. Any of these actors misbehaving leads to potential attacks. Because of that, the Certificate Transparency project was created to _potentially_ catch bad actors, that is if you check for your own domains regularly.
Using a consensus-based registry, you can prevent (better than detect) attacks in both of these scenarios. Let people register their identity or domain name, and associate a public key to it that can be used to encrypt communications with the identity/domain, as long as the number of dishonest actors remain under a threshold no attacks are possible.
The only (albeit not small) downside is that by taking middle men out of the picture, the naive approach prevents account recovery from happening. So to be practical, you need to find the right middle ground.
[+] [-] cracker_jacks|4 years ago|reply
I think this just shifts the responsibility and point of attack onto the owner (which is true for all decentralized crypto). An attack is still possible and worse yet, it is completely irreversible.
That said, the option of taking personal custody and responsibility is important and I think it should always be an option.
[+] [-] hadcomplained|4 years ago|reply
This fact has been irritating me for a long time. Because no one should believe that every single certificate authority is tolerant to any attempts to steal the private keys. But that is exactly the underlying assumption behind HTTPS being the only way to use HTTP in a more secure manner than exchanging in plaintext.
Let's think about this scenario: Suppose that I built a web service for my personal use and hosted it in public cloud. I don't trust any certificate authorities, so I created my own TLS certificate without using them. I installed my own certificates on the machine from which to connect to my web service. Now the server for my web service is serving in HTTPS using my own certificate. Am I safe? No. Because any entity with access to the private key of any of the certificate authorities trusted by my machine, is capable of intercepting the communication between my machine and my server, simply by MITM.
The problem of being forced to trust certificate authorities can be solved by adding the feature to embed a public key in a url. For example, it would be wonderful to have a url like httpsecure://rsa:PUBLICKEY/example.com/ to make sure example.com always responds using the key PUBLICKEY. IIRC, the Tor onion services is an instance of this -- the .onion domains include public keys.
[+] [-] BLanen|4 years ago|reply
Yea, fuck that.
Also, as with 99% of "smart contracts". The main contract which allows for updating the smart contract, and thus is ultimately in control of everything, is controlled by 1 private key. Nice "trustless". Just gotta trust this one entity never to make a mistake.
Also, this has literally already been done at least 5 other times already before the "NFT" acronym was invented. Remember namecoin, anyone?
[+] [-] Tenoke|4 years ago|reply
It's a trade-off but some people can take care of their keys and prefer that risk which they've covered over a risk that a third party can take control which they can't cover. It's fine if you are not one of those people but not everyone has your needs.
[+] [-] SheinhardtWigCo|4 years ago|reply
> Will My Life Change?
> Yes, my friend! It will because you can easily build your own decentralized website and simplify your cross wallet crypto payments, share music and photos (not just of my kids), start a business, secure and verify your identity “on chain”, or showcase your brilliant NFT art gallery.
[+] [-] ectopod|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aetherspawn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjmunro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonameiguess|4 years ago|reply
I really don't understand what this woman thinks she is buying. I guess this is a better storage medium for precious moments and collectibles than sending copies of everything to gmail, but so is almost any other way of storing something.
[+] [-] throwaway_isms|4 years ago|reply
No offense, but in all likelihood no one is attempting to counterfeit or pirate your Mom's videos and photos of your childhood, and ownership/p2p ownership transfers are not material.
There are almost infinite real world examples were ownership records are benefited by blockchain technologies over centralized services. Take property deeds, usually kept and recorded at the County level, there is almost endless fraud with people filing forged quitclaim deeds on a daily basis. That would be an example of a public record, but their are private record keeping examples such as stock certificates. Usually the "Dole" case is the most famous example, where you have a publicly traded company with all the benefits of corporate record keeping, stock trusts and banks, and centralized stock exchanges, but when the buyer went to take it private low and behold the public company with all the centralized safe guards in the world should have had a total capitalization of 36M shared but somehow had about 49M share issued, it only ended up in $150M in damages, but this could not have happened using blockchain and most agree nearly every publicly traded company likely would have the same inconsistencies.
[+] [-] cookiengineer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jesp010|4 years ago|reply
Link of old comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22174009
[+] [-] roachpepe|4 years ago|reply
It says so on the internet, so it must be true.
[+] [-] fastball|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
[+] [-] mrnobody_67|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bastawhiz|4 years ago|reply
https://docs.unstoppabledomains.com/domain-registry-essentia...
From the docs it seems like you can "hardcode" IPs or...a traditional dns cname.
At $40/domain, if you update your DNS records once every two years, you're really only just breaking even.
Also, from the FAQ:
> Trademark holders with proof of ownership can apply to claim ownership of trademarked names. If a trademark name has already been sold, then it will be refunded. Note - this process ends once domains have been distributed. Unstoppable Domains does not have the ability to move a domain once distribution has occurred.
Seems like a less-than-agreeable policy for most folks. Unless you're a scalper.
[+] [-] 542458|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsmith99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifty|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neals|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] BenjiWiebe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twobitshifter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomcooks|4 years ago|reply
Take me back to the boring, reliable, niche internet and keep the use cases.
[+] [-] prepend|4 years ago|reply
Other domains aren’t available yet.
NFTs for names is a really good idea but it seems like the novelty is in getting acceptance and trust. Not sure why a random org should get really substantial fees for names. For ICANN we’re forced to. But for a good blockchain solution the prices should be equitable.
I understand that reselling goes to the owner, but this seems like a cash grab.
That and many domains like common first names aren’t available yet.
[+] [-] imiric|4 years ago|reply
The high cost does prevent abuse though, as squatting would be a bigger nuisance than it is with traditional DNS if registration were cheap/free.
[+] [-] mrnobody_67|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ketralnis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imiric|4 years ago|reply
So I'm hopeful that some of this new tech can disrupt the current system, which we know is inherently flawed.[1]
While I'm not going to use Opera anytime soon, we should celebrate this news and push for other browsers to do the same.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pp72gUYx00
[+] [-] doublerabbit|4 years ago|reply
I use OpenNIC and know how to navigate around my router. However for my mother, that's a whole different story.
[+] [-] INTPenis|4 years ago|reply
At that time they had ads inside of the UI of the browser so I had to make a firewall rule to block those, but other than that it was a great browser in the pre-noscript days.
But I've also heard some insider info from a Norwegian pal and apparently it's a disaster in that company. Only reason they're still alive today is all the embedded work.
[+] [-] russellbeattie|4 years ago|reply
Ethereum needs to move to Proof of Stake ASAP.
Edit: Also, it looks like this deal doesn't include ENS. I thought "unstoppable" was just being used as an adjective at first, but it's a company.
[+] [-] crazypython|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] space_rock|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysea|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terrycody|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellow0rldz|4 years ago|reply
This news is interesting as I wonder what happens if .crypto does become a TLD?