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On the blockchain and DNS (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by thefreepenguinalt@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml

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No, I'm not going to sell you on the 42069th cryptocurrency (thank goodness!), I just think that focusing on crypto, and, god forbid, NFTs, completely wastes the potential that blockchains have. Case-in-point: DNS. The centralization of DNS has been a disaster for the internet. The solution: Decentralize DNS with a free register-deregister system. As DNS is now decentralized, hosting fees will decrease dramatically. Laws will also need to be made to prevent DNS-scalping, so as to prevent people from sitting on domains and selling them for high prices. This might be resolved through either domain limiting or traffic tests, where a domain must keep a minimum amount of traffic over time in order to justify it staying registered. Otherwise, it would get deregistered and become freely up for grabs.

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[–] blackbread@lemmygrad.ml 19 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I don't think blockchain is a suitable for DNS (or for anything actually).

To "run a blockchain" requires a lot of infrastructure. At a minimum I think you need communication between all the participants (otherwise how would one tell the others it has successfully produced the next block?) and you need some kind of pool of waiting registrations that they can all access (otherwise what would they build a block from?).

The block chain is just a ledger, and a ledger is a terrible format for DNS data because it requires scanning every ledger record to find a match (so it scales linearly with the number of times anyone modifies a DNS entry). To solve this any real DNS will need to covert the ledger into an internal database. I would think all this complexity would raise costs, not lower them.

The existent DNS (a simple distributed hierarchical database) is replaced by a voluminous distributed ledger system. This change by itself doesn't resolve any of the problems you mentioned.

You've said a few other things that don't make technical sense:

"hosting fees will decrease": A .com or .org DNS domain name is about $10 a year and is independent of the amount of traffic you have. Different DNS subdomains also charge different amounts, so it's mostly a nominal fee.
"A domain must keep a minimum amount of traffic": There is no accurate tracking of traffic to a domain name because it's often cached (this is why you're advised to wait multiple hours after making DNS changes to see the effects).

I think you are conflating hosting with DNS. The DNS is just the resolution of a human readable string to a bunch of keywords (e.g. www server addresses, mail addresses, metadata tags, etc). Hosting is providing the necessary servers and bandwidth to deliver the services (like email, websites, torrents, etc).

[–] bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 15 points 9 months ago

Decentralization is just so inefficient in most case, really the only issue with centralization is that, since we live in a capitalist society, it ends up in hands of the capitalists.

[–] thefreepenguinalt@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Don't you have to pay for a domain because of the fact that it's hosted on a DNS server? Decentralizing DNS would mean that one would no longer have to pay for a DNS server to host your domain.

The "minimum amount of traffic" comment might not have been worded in the best of ways. What I mean is that we need a method to prevent people from sitting on unused domains to sell them at a high price.

[–] oscardejarjayes@hexbear.net 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The blockchain has to run on something, so even decentralized it would probably end up something paid. There might also end up a secondary market for domains, just like we have now, but worse.

Also, it most definitely does not cost $10 in compute, storage, or bandwidth to serve your one address. Besides, you basically never pay directly to the registry(the people that run the root and authoritative DNS servers), but instead buy from a registrar (a middleman). A lot of what you pay goes to the middleman, because they can usually get away with asking for it.

[–] blackbread@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 9 months ago

As oscardejarjayes has said, the $10 isn't for computer resources, it's mostly to pay the customer facing domain registrars and disincentivize squatting domains. Each subdomain (.com, .ca, .uk, etc) is controlled by some entity and for national domains part of the fee is a tax set by and collected for that nation.

In terms of the "compute" required for the DNS -- that's actually your internet service provider. ISPs synchronize and serve up DNS locally in order to give you faster internet (so users pay for DNS indirectly). You might have switched your domain to 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS servers) which Google provides for free in order to try to speed up peoples internet access.

[–] PoY@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 9 months ago

DNS is just a hierarchy of authoritative domain name servers that agree on a group of root servers and a protocol