
The Internet Can No Longer Be Censored - rasengan
https://dns.live/topclaim-clean.html
======
rasengan
Submission Statement (SS):

Handshake is a naming system built in a decentralized way utilizing
blockchain. It's been quietly in development for several years, but it only
launched in February of 2020. The system builds on top of the legacy DNS
system, further extending and improving upon it, so all legacy domains will
continue to resolve (e.g. ycombinator.com). However, since ycombinator was in
the top 100K Alexa, it can also claim ycombinator. and simply use that name
(more on this later).

The blockchain distributes names by 'releasing' permission to open an auction
on a schedule wherein a SHA3 hash of a name is modulo'd (%) against 52 to
determine the week it will be available. When a name is available, anybody can
send an OPEN transaction which will subsequently open up a public blind
Vickrey auction for everyone to participate. Potential buyers can then send
bids and, whoever wins, will pay the second highest bid [1]. They can also add
an optional blind to the bid to mask their actual bid (so I can bid 10, but
add a blind of 50 to make it look like I bid 60 to try to scare people off for
example - like a bluff in poker). After bidding ends, a reveal period starts
where the actual bids are revealed.

Since launch, there have been a number of domains opened and sold. Some names
have sold for quite a bit of value, such as crypto for 200,000 HNS [2]! This
is at the time of this writing, the equivalent of $32,000.

Past naming projects have struggled for adoption due to the fact that existing
stakeholders in the space (e.g., popular websites, etc.) were unable to obtain
their own names. In order to make sure this would make sense for everyone in
the world, the blockchain prereserved the top 100K domains (and the legacy
internet, so all existing tlds) for the people who are leasing/holding these
names today [3].

Recently, major websites including torrentfreak, voat and brave have claimed
their names [4].

In terms of funding, the project received $10m from early sponsors [5] and
donated it all to FOSS projects and non profit organizations
[6][7][8][9][10][11][12]!

Unlike many of the 'blockchains' that have come into existence, a fundamental
difference of Handshake has been that the founding team and earliest
developers did not receive a substantial amount of coins. Instead, they
received similar amounts to that of the original coin sponsors which includes
the who's who of Silicon Valley. Further, the vast majority of the genesis
coins have been distributed to FOSS developers (that's worth ~150m today) and
FOSS/non profit projects [13]. There are a lot more coin allocations described
in the design notes [14]. The blockchain is owned at a minimum by the open
source internet community or, at best, the whole of humanity [15].

From an ownership perspective, the internet namespace, and the world namespace
really, should belong to the people. Handshake is an experiment to deliver it
to its rightful owners. From a technical perspective, Handshake creates an
opportunity to finally upgrade our technology to gain real security as we will
no longer need to rely on third party CAs [16] nor keep hot keys on servers
since DNSSEC keys can be stored offline [17]. To be clear, without Handshake,
DANE is a backdoor [18]. With Handshake, DANE is complete and the internet is
more secure.

How can you get involved?

1\. Start using a hosted or local resolver [19][20]!

2\. Register a name and use it [21][22]!

3\. Develop and integrate the Handshake Naming System with existing software.

4\. Submit PRs to hsd[23] or the newer implementations that are being
developed like the Rust implementation, rsd[24].

[1] [https://www.namebase.io/blog/tutorial-3-basics-of-
handshake-...](https://www.namebase.io/blog/tutorial-3-basics-of-handshake-
auction-and-bidding/)

[2] [https://hsd.tools/leaderboard](https://hsd.tools/leaderboard)

[3] [https://dns.live/top.html](https://dns.live/top.html)

[4] [https://dns.live/topclaim-clean.html](https://dns.live/topclaim-
clean.html)

[5]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20191123130625/https://handshake...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191123130625/https://handshake.org/)

[6] [https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-
receives-1...](https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-
receives-1-million-from-handshake)

[7]
[https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329](https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329)

[8] [https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-
receives...](https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-
receives-400000-from-handshake-org/)

[9] [https://www.gimp.org/news/2018/08/30/handshake-gnome-
donatio...](https://www.gimp.org/news/2018/08/30/handshake-gnome-donation/)

[10] [https://dot.kde.org/2020/01/21/kde-receives-generous-
donatio...](https://dot.kde.org/2020/01/21/kde-receives-generous-donation-
handshake-foundation)

[11] [https://calligra.org/news/handshake-
donation/](https://calligra.org/news/handshake-donation/)

[12] [http://guix.gnu.org/.i18n/de/blog/2018/gnu-guix-receives-
don...](http://guix.gnu.org/.i18n/de/blog/2018/gnu-guix-receives-donation-
from-the-handshake-project/)

[13] [https://github.com/handshake-org/hs-
airdrop](https://github.com/handshake-org/hs-airdrop)

[14]
[https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt](https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt)
; Search for: "# Stakeholders"

[15]
[https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt](https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt)
; Search for: "# Project Summary"

[16] [https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/what-is-a-rogue-
certificate...](https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/what-is-a-rogue-certificate/)

[17] [https://github.com/handshake-org/hdns](https://github.com/handshake-
org/hdns)

[18] [https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2016/10/27/14-dns-nerds-dont-
con...](https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2016/10/27/14-dns-nerds-dont-control-the-
internet/)

[19] [https://nextdns.io/](https://nextdns.io/)

[20] [https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd](https://github.com/handshake-
org/hsd) \--rs-port 53 | port forward dest 127.0.0.1:53 -> 5350

[21] [https://www.namebase.io](https://www.namebase.io)

[22] [https://github.com/kyokan/bob-wallet](https://github.com/kyokan/bob-
wallet)

[23] [https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd](https://github.com/handshake-
org/hsd)

[24] [https://github.com/UrkelLabs/rsd](https://github.com/UrkelLabs/rsd)

~~~
rvz
I hope so, but good luck if your infrastructure is on AWS, GCP or Azure. By
the time the guys there find you on their resources doing things they don't
want you to, everything in your account is finished.

More companies are hosting their infrastructure based on large FAAMNG company
resources and they have control over them and reserve the right to shutdown
your service without notice if they want.

Some of them like Facebook and Google are already ICAAN members and are
entrenched on the internet can _never_ be avoided or even taken down and
Google issues out domains for websites which they can choose to censor or take
down if they want to. This is equivalent to having admin rights to the
internet or parts of it.

Although very unlikely, if any one of them had bought a significant TLD like
.org, .io or even .net or .com, then this mission would have failed.

