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Handshake Domains Are a Scam (akshat.sh)
25 points by AkshatJ27 on Aug 28, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



Other than the conflicts (which is a valid issue) everything else is nonsense.

> It is a PoW Blockchain

It's much better for it to be on PoW and being useful enough for the security of the TLDs and the prevention of a repeat of this [0] [1] where everyone was complaining about .org being seized and .io price increases and successful DNS hijacking attempts [2], [3].

Why would a system that deals with TLDs and domains be implemented on blockchains like Solana which had significant downtime and has the risk of increased censorship? No one wants their domain to go down every month like what happened to Solana. Seems like such a system would be worse off on PoS and it doesn't matter if it is Ethereum, since the system is still the same.

Maybe this time, DANE would work on a system like Handshake [4], removing the need for CAs.

> You cannot actually use your domain

Tor can only be used with extensions and custom browsers, regularly pushed by readers on this site to get around censorship. Even criminals use it as well to sell their illegal products via Tor and other companies using the .onion extension, like Facebook and the BBC. Does that mean that is also a scam because I can't access .onion on Chrome, Firefox?

I don't see how hard it is to download a different browser like Beacon Browser [5] just like downloading Tor Browser, or Brave to access .onion domains.

This rest of this section is the pricing set by Namecheap if one wants to use a Handshake second level domain, since they own the TLD, and can do what they want with the pricing of selling of the SLD.

> It acts out like a Ponzi scheme

Centralized registrars allowing a marketplace of bidding and selling TLDs and domains is now 'like' a Ponzi scheme? I don't see how this is different with the current domain snipers today and in the early days hoarding lots of domains for years and selling them afterwards.

Maybe the whole domain name marketplace was like a pyramid scheme frenzy in 1993 then.

> Buying HNS domains on a centralized registrar, with no ability to transfer your domain, defeats HNS’s purpose. Namecheap knows this and continues to sell HNS domains.

Yet decentralized registrars already exist [6] if one doesn't want to use Namecheap's service. This is just a complaint mostly about centralized registrars jumping on Handshake. That doesn't make Handshake itself a scam since one can still own a TLD themselves on the chain, better than asking ICANN $100K+ per TLD.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21611677

[1] https://thehackerblog.com/the-io-error-taking-control-of-all...

[2] https://cointelegraph.com/news/curve-finance-exploit-experts...

[3] https://cryptopotato.com/dns-hijack-compromised-ankrs-servic...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na...

[5] https://impervious.com/beacon

[6] https://impervious.domains




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