
A Blockchain-based DNS and HTTP server - timtadh
https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain
======
dchuk
Am I the only one who finds anything bitcoin/blockchain related to come off as
so incredibly complex and buzz wordy and technical that the mainstream will
never adopt it?

I feel like it would be a really valuable endeavor to try and make this all
much more simple to understand. Right now it just reads like gibberish to
anyone other than the sufficiently technical.

~~~
asperous
The solution is to just not explain how it works, the public doesn't need to
understand how it works to use it and to trust it.

If people who advocated for the web explained the entire networking stack
every time they tried to get people to use it they'd miss how it helps them.

~~~
johnhenry
I agree with all of the above. It's difficult to see how useful this is among
the deep technical explanation. The chart on the github page emphasizes
features of DNSChain that the current system lacks, but perhaps a chart
showing where the current system fails and where this fixes those issues would
be more useful?

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dannyrosen
This is a very interesting and potentially groundbreaking solution. I'm just a
tad bit concerned that the tech is represented by... a turtle.

~~~
ryan-c
This a layer on top of Namecoin which actually was released over three years
ago, inspired by Aaron Swartz's musings[1].

1\.
[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko)

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dsl
Remember that some "censorship" is good. When FinFisher is being used by a
repressive government against protesters and journalists, or a Zeus trojan has
nabbed the credentials for your bank account, it's really nice for the
security folks to be able to take down the domains being used for command and
control.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Remember that some "censorship" is good.

What you're describing as "good censorship" doesn't actually require any
censorship at all. All you need is a mechanism to notify users (or their
client software) that a name is designated as malicious. Then the user or the
user's client can decide what to do with that information, including ignoring
the designation and connecting to the address anyway. That way it can't be
used for censorship but it can be used to put ye olde red screen of malware
alert in front of the user.

~~~
nibblepointer
How do you determine the authenticity of such notifications without a central
authority?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
You obviously need someone to maintain the blacklist. That party could sign
their work. If they do a poor job (false positives / false negatives), users
and makers of client software can switch to some other blacklist maintainer at
any time.

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evv
What are the differences between this and namecoin?

~~~
ryan-c
It's middleware running on top of Namecoin's RPC interface. It does not have
it's own blockchain.

~~~
rakoo
More specifically, it _uses_ namecoin and the information you store in there
[0] [1] and makes it accessible to non-namecoin software through DNS and HTTP.

Best use-case, to me: put your TLS certificates with DANE structures, and you
can be sure they aren't spoofed by anyone when someone gets your records. No
need for the heavy and centralized DNSSEC.

[0]
[https://wiki.namecoin.info/index.php?title=Identity](https://wiki.namecoin.info/index.php?title=Identity)
[1]
[https://wiki.namecoin.info/index.php?title=Domain_Name_Speci...](https://wiki.namecoin.info/index.php?title=Domain_Name_Specification)

