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This makes me wonder: isn't this basically the perfect thing to bootstrap a decentralized DNS with? In a messaging system there's no reason you'd ever want to revoke control of a domain, and the idea of genuinely-anonymizable communication should be appealing to just about anyone.

I might not be thinking broadly enough here though.




I think decentralized DNS with machine readable addresses is basically a solved problem (e.g. Magnet links or Tor Hidden Services).

A domain in this case is akin to a hash of a public key, or something like that, just enough to securely identify the target of the communication so there’s nothing to “revoke” although that’s not to say the peer discovery systems could not try to blacklist you.

Decentralized DNS with human readable addresses (unique screen names) is perhaps more a political problem than a technical one, and hence never fully “solved” just different sets of trade-offs that can be made.


People want a permissionless (like bitcoin) name service, and they also don't want good names / trademarks to be squatted.

However, between these two you can only pick one. You can't solve squatting problem without some kind of authority over issued names.


Social attestations are another solution to this, unless you count them as an authority over issued names. “If all my friends are convinced this person is called Bob, that’s good enough for me”. Doesn’t help with uniqueness though, but that’s what we have keys for.


I'm not talking about the technical problem, the technical problem is solved (including for human-readable addresses, which is the part that actually matters), I'm talking about the political part of the problem. "No one bothers with decentralized DNS," here's the problem space it's the killer tool for.


>there's no reason you'd ever want to revoke control of a domain

Careful with those words. Experience taught me that if there isn't a reason to ever want to do that, reality will eventually provide you with one.


Worst possible case you can drop the messages from a domain, which is how federated systems already work.

There's no reason to ever revoke control for messaging systems, though, genuinely: imagine if your e-mail address could be taken on a whim by anyone. It can be! But you'd never want to revoke control of a domain rather than just marking it as spam or illegal and dropping messages from it. It functions as an inbox more than it functions as an outbox.

Addressing space should be permanent.


Digging a little into the posts about HOW they setup the communication channel does seem like it could be used to inform a system for that. So Kinda?


It may not be satisfactory in terms of performance though. Decentralization comes with its own baggage.


Current decentralized DNS projects have many problems that revolve almost entirely around UX, but performance isn't really one of them.

Especially given in an environment like this it'd be used mostly to get the initial connection, performance probably wouldn't be too big a problem.


Which current decentralized DNS projects are you referring to?




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