[dns-operations] blockchain DNS

Sat Jan 27 21:51:32 UTC 2018

On Sat, Jan 27, 2018 at 2:51 PM, Mark Jeftovic <markjr at easydns.com> wrote:

>
>
> John R Levine wrote:
>
> > For every Sci-Hub, there are a dozen Daily Stormers and a thousand fake
> > phish banks, fake "Canadian" pharmacies, and other malicious sites.  The
> > history of name registries that don't deal with illegal activities is,
> > to put it mildly, unpleasant.  If you haven't seen any of them, that's
> > not a coincidence, other networks tend not to accept their traffic.
> >
> > For the specific issue of Sci-Hub, academics claim they want open access
> > to their papers, at least in developing countries, but they send those
> > papers to publishers like Elsevier who charge $30 a peek.  They need to
> > make up their minds.  And while the technology of an online open access
> > journal is straightforward, nobody's figured out how to do for free the
> > useful part of what Elsevier does, gatekeepers and reviewers who find
> > the publication-worthy stuff in the mountain of garbage.
> >
>
> A lot of people pined for a decentralized P2P DNS over the years, every
> time their was outrage at ICANN or Verisign, something I always said was
> impossible, until blockchain came along and I realized how wrong I'd been.
>
> When the Ethereum Name Service WG met last summer they seemed to prefer
> an immutable registry at the bottom (blockchain) with governance,
> blocking, filtering happening at "Layer 2", something I'm personally
> skeptical about.
>
> But then when you sit down actually try to design your registry
> implementation you run into all these things you're talking about above.
> Governance is "non-trivial" and I think it's a mistake to think it can
> just be deferred to "layer 2" because nobody even knows what that looks
> like right now.
>

I disagree with the claim that there is a need to put 'governance' in the
DNS layer. You can do just fine if you put the governance in a layer above
the DNS which is of course the function of the WebPKI.

The WebPKI was developed and deployed to achieve accountability. The DNS
is not.

Trying to rely on the DNS infrastructure to mitigate criminal activity is
futile. Which is why I find the attempts to dilute the WebPKI to be nothing
more than an adjunct to DNS validation (which does not happen) to be
retrograde.

Of course, most people don't want to be spending the type of money
required for an effective validation process.
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