• FaceDeer@fedia.io
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      7 months ago

      I just did. The ENS system, a decentralized replacement for DNS. That’s what started this subthread.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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          7 months ago

          Full decentralization and censorship resistance. In the case of DNS services there’s still an organization of some kind that you’re having to trust to not mismanage your registration. Both now in their current form and in any future form the organization may take.

          ENS, on the other hand, is just a smart contract running on Ethereum. Its behaviour is programmed, not dependent on any human decision making. To censor it you’d need to block Ethereum as a whole.

          • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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            7 months ago

            So then nothing related to NFTs at all but instead a specific application of a specific blockchain…

            • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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              7 months ago

              How does your FLOSS software solve the Byzantine Generals problem? If two different people want to use the same domain name, how is it determined who gets it? These are the things that blockchains contribute a solution to.

              It’s not enough that the software that everything’s running on is free/libre. Determining who gets a scarce resource (unique names) is the real difficulty here.

                • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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                  7 months ago

                  It isn’t a problem when you’re just running software on your own computer and have no need to communicate with anyone else.

                  But that’s not the case for domain names. It wouldn’t work at all if we each had our own private little parallel universe, it defeats the whole purpose of a domain name system. We all need to agree on which names are associated with which IP addresses.

                  I’m not trying to promote blockchains as a one-size-fits-all universal solution for every problem. That’s silly, no technology is a universal solution for every problem. Blockchains are very good at solving a specific subset of problems, and DNS names IMO is one of those. When you need everyone to agree on a particular fact and you don’t want to designate some particular authority to be “in charge” of validating that fact then that’s exactly what a blockchain is for.

                  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                    7 months ago

                    I agree with pretty much everything you said, except the conclusion. For DNS, we don’t need distributed consensus, we have ICANN and that seems to work pretty well. We’d only need a blockchain if we needed to replace ICANN for some reason.

                    So assuming ICANN exists, you only need to trust registrars, which are regulate both by ICANN and whatever municipality they operate in.

                    Building a separate system to ICANN may be desirable in an abstract sense (ICANN kinda sucks in some ways), but it’s a bit too disruptive for too little gain since it would force everyone to go repurchase domains, leading to mismatches with the current system, causing confusion and enabling fraud. That’s a pretty high cost for minimal gain.

                    In other words, just because we can doesn’t mean we should. And this is coming from someone who is interested in crypto (mostly Monero) and distributed computing in general.