smart businessman worry bad press? But you know whats going on at stock markets, do you? Besides why would we expect businessmen to be smart? And why would we expect that buying a domain was about owning a domain? This is not about the Coca-Cola Company buying cocacola.safe from a competitor. This is about basically anyone cloning a page, hijacking it and damaging a business by commiting fraud.
or, they may care (like me). Giving domains to those with the most economic potential is effectively reproducing the current system.
In a decentralized system it is impossible not to loose valuable addresses long-term as you correctly say. However, this is not about everlasting addresses, this is about short-term-instability, which is unneeded. I linked a proposed solution in my last post. Here it is again.
Yes, a DNS is ONE big address book - and thatĀ“s precisely why DNS are valuable. If the relations are unstable as you propose, users would need to bookmark native addresses, same as they could bookmark IPs in the current system. Most people would agree that this is only feasible from a user perspective, not from a commercial perspective or from the perspective of a blogger who wants to point people to his blog other than saying āHey, here is my QR codeā. A social web needs collective structures that are not manipulable short-term, particularly not by those with the largest economic power.
yes i remember
pretty much the system we do have right now
everybody can choose to use another dns-server alreadyā¦ but if you donāt register your website at icann only close to nobody will find you ā¦ most internet users donāt even know what DNS is, even fewer know that alternative domain name systems do really exist and probably most would just klick āokā when a question about which DNS service do you want to use pops upā¦
ā¦so the first DNS service being there is the most important one - it has to be managed by people ā¦ sounds like a lot of management and unnecessary work for me ā¦ so itās expensive, slow and gives pretty much power to relatively few people
yeah pretty much, same us an apple is pretty much like an orange. It often happens on this forum that people make comparisons based on theoretical feasibility which doesnĀ“t make a lot of sense when things are actual about pragmatism. The main reason why people do not use alternative DNS is because non-technical people (99% of all internet users) a) donĀ“t understand what a DNS is b) it affords them to install additional software c) itĀ“s confusing because syntax is not always the same (and most likely d, e, fā¦ small hurdles from a technical point of view are often the decisive ones from a pragmatist perspective)
When people start using SAFE we can assume that they are aware of the possibility to use a different DNS. They also already installed a piece of software that they do not use commonly. If then the browser displays different popular DNS and allows them to choose with one-click and the exact same syntax that is an entirely different situation to the status quo.
I donĀ“t see the problem with that, as long as it is not the only one.
Why would it have to be managed by people? I thought you read the link. I didnĀ“t speak about people managing the DNS.
okay I agree - the choice of DNS would be on a completely different level ā¦ so maybe you are right and it also changes how people think about it
yes you didnāt - i just supposed that
would be a person; and it would have to answer questions, delete unused links and redirect them if someone lost his login.
but yes you can automize things ā¦ so ā¦ your suggestion is first come first serve but many of them so people can switch and choose which internet they like most ā¦?
Kind of. Yes it is āfirst come, first serveā but in comparison to the current system my proposition is more permeable. Assume that within the first two years a pretty universal DNS develops that is used by 99% of all SAFE users, but still very few, say 50000, names are registered. Now imagine two cases
After two years large investors become interested in SAFE and intend to make money by grabbing 1,000,000,000 addresses based on current DNS popularity and value. Given my proposal this already cost them something, but depending on who does it, this can be peanuts. The effect is domain name scarcity throughout the system or - to be more precise - scarcity based on a given popular discourse of naming. Since the real value of a DNS are not the names but (as with every social network) its popularity (that is: the users), users may get unhappy that one or a few actors intent to make money by setting up a hurdle to new users. They decide to create a new DNS and move over. Popularity of the old DNS decreases and after a period of uncertainity the new DNS gains popularity - so itĀ“s basically forking the DNS.
At a very early moment when registering domains is insanely cheap a bored or hostile user decides to register as many domains as he*she can and to destroy the keys so anyone will ever be able to register them anymore. This also creates scarcity but cannot be compensated by purchase. Users may then turn to totally random strings of letters and numbers that werenĀ“t registered, but thatĀ“s not really functional as long as you donĀ“t mind to say āHey, join me on my blog, its swqjfwq35nmaduralas.onion.ā People would set up a new DNS and start from scratch.
I believe that both cases are highly unlikely with the proposition that I made. While technically it would be possible that users would repeat the scheme over and over again (blocking as many domains as possible as quickly as they can), pragmatically it is likely that they wouldnĀ“t even try once, because when anything causes the majority of users to move to a different DNS their whole āinvestmentā is just gone. That means there is a systemic incentive not to piss the majority of users - or expressed positively: to work together.
As you said, we already have different DNS, SAFE will provide just another one added to the list. And in the future we can expect that it becomes more heterogeneous. Hopefully. I mean, that is what decentralization is all about isnĀ“t it? So I think we do best if we work towards a future where it is easy to switch between systems and where there is still potential for stability.
Actually, I am not against this either in terms of mark up linking. Why shouldnāt they resolve just using the native naming system?
IMO, it is more about navigating to the site from a typed string. Search engines can do that, but they are currently centralised* and can my used for censorship too.
We have to remember that the current Internet has all sorts of baggage that it carriers around. IPv4 means there arenāt enough IP addresses for each site to have their own, which makes the whole thing dependent on DNS. Whole IPv6 seeks to resolve this, they have been talking about it for decades and we still donāt have it - core changes are often avoided due to the complexity of role out.
With Safe net, we will get a gigantic address space from the outset. Something silly like the number of atoms in the universe sort of size. Therefore we donāt need DNS to share IPs. Moreover, Safe net addresses arenāt tied to a network location or a server, so unlike an IP address, they will seldom change, if ever (short of losing access some how). You can also register safe net addresses at will, for free, which you canāt do with IP addresses.
In short, we are dealing with a rather different use case. It appears similar at first, but there are important differences. We need a solution in tune with what we need on safe, not what worked on the old net.
Maybe we are asking the wrong question here though. Is the real solution a distributed search engine, rather than just friendly name resolution?
You are also thinking in theoretical terms. Pragmatically there are about several thousands of highly valuable addresses, millions of usable addresses and bazzillion senseless combinations of letters and characters.
The problem arises where people can create custom address like safe:artiscience.me. This is what creates scarcity and value in an environment where there is an endless ammount of potential combinations of letters. If the system only allowed to generate random addresses, IĀ“d agree - we wouldnĀ“t have the problem (well, if there is some kind of threshold to generate an address, if itĀ“s in general free, then it may still be problematic), because users will set up different DNS systems aside from system integration. However, if it is possible to create custom addresses, it will appear and work like one big DNS.
I donĀ“t think the proposition I made is necessary, but itĀ“s necessary to have random native addresses rather than custom ones if we donĀ“t want to deal with one master DNS as @catbert points out .
Ok - I see what you mean - and I think you are right - there should be a possibility of switching easier between name-spaces than today, because whatever DNS is chosen it could turn out to be not the one we want to have
also we could think about the ābuilt-inā-DNS of @Senecaās suggestion and parallel the option to switch to a static/managed DNS if really people start messing around starting bidding wars - the more options available the better - and the most accepted solution will be the one people will use 100 years from now
This is what Iāve been wondering since yesterday as well. Iām considering re-designing my proposal as a native search mechanism rather than a DNS-like system. That way it could coexist with a ārealā DNS system.
Related to that, what do you guys think is the most user-friendly way to tell a browser to use SAFE rather than the existing web? Using safe: as a prefix, or .safe as a suffix?
Since people arenāt used to typing http:// on the existing web, if I register the name seneca on SAFE, I think itās more user friendly to let people type for example seneca.safe rather than safe:seneca, even though the latter makes more sense from a technical perspective.
Assuming we use that, typing in the browser bar seneca.safe would use the actual DNS, whereas typing merely seneca could use the search feature. That way another dude who has registered seneca2.safe can also sign up under the name seneca, and weāll both appear in the search result list.
Itās easier to type without ://, so itās a no brainer. And yes, it would use a DNS proxy, as Iāve been arguing all along.
You resolve .safe in the proxy (using ugly or nice .safe names, I donāt care), and the rest goes to a regular DNS client.
The search thing is different because results would depend on your app. In my app Iād resolve seneca to whatever I get paid it to resolve. In some other app it might be hard-coded. Itās not something that SAFE should deal with in a centralized/uniform manner, IMO.
Not bad, it took us only 150 posts to return to the same (and standard) approach that Tor Browser uses!
Itās hard to tell what would happen in that case, but yes, itās not inconceivable that in the worst case it could be registered by a 3rd party.
In that case internal filtering mechanism could preempt all .safe and send them to the SAFE resolver (but the browser then couldnāt access āthe DNS version of .safeā.
But if anyone tries to register .safe after MaidSafe starts using it, I donāt think that would go too well. Personally I would use .safe first, since SAFE apps can always force .safe to resolve to SAFE network addresses.
Things become very confusing if .safe is either SAFENetwork or a TLD, and I think best avoided.
Another consideration here, even if thereās no .safe TLD, is that .safe will look like a TLD, whereas safe: is clearly something else. I think this is good:
SAFE is something very different, and this will be conveyed to those savvy enough to be early adopters every time anyone shares a safe: URL
the distinction raises the question, and perhaps the curiosity to find out: what is this weird āsafe:ā thingy?
itās almost grammatical. It says, what follows āsafe:ā is safe! I like that
I should clarify this: it wouldnāt go well for the guys trying to commercialize .safe, not for us.
Whoever uses it first, especially in a non-proprietary and open manner, will have the advantage.
I am comparing native safe net addresses (first come, first serve, text strings) with IP addresses.
Compared to 4 sets of numbers between 1 and 254, punctuated by full stops, which are rationed out by ISPs, safe net native addresses are very expressive.
After all this discussion youād think someone actually checked whatās going on in the outside worldā¦
Hereās one relevant link for our peer group of name resolution experts.
Address 6sgjmi53igmg7fm7 is often cited in this thread, but people should be aware that raw addresses will be much longer. An ID is 512 bits long, that is 64 bytes, encoded in base64 that generates an 86 bytes string.
A DNS is needed because a user can type can type safe:www.google but not something like:
safe:www.[ZGYxOGU2MDU4ZmYwM2ZhNjVhMGU1MTYyZjUwMGFmNjlmN2FkYzU4YzQyMzQwZGNiMmJmYTkzNzM3NDQ5YmU0ZA]
But programs are able to manage such addresses and I think this should solved many of the issues raised in this thread, for examples:
The browser can memorize the 512 bits ID in an updatable SD, so that the next time the user type safe:www.google, he will be sure to land in the same the page as before
Format of URL copy & paste can contain the encoded ID, so if I email a link I am sure my recipients will open the right page.
Web page designers can automatically generate links containing the ID of the expected site
Domain name squatting is already an issue on the current Domain Name
System (DNS). The SAFE Network has the opportunity to rethink how DNS
could work in a SAFE way.
I propose allowing domain names to be registered multiple times by
multiple users, allow domain names to be registered for free, and to
track how many times each registered domain name is viewed. The domain
name with the most views has the highest ranking. This ranking is then
used by the browser to determine which domain name to display.
Example:
Bob registers SAFE:www.site and obtains 100 views
Alice registers SAFE:www.site and obtains 1,000 views
John regiters SAFE:www.site and obtains 1,000,000 views
Joe types SAFE:www.site into his browser. The browser then returns
Johnās version of SAFE:www.site because it has the most views. Joe also
has the option to look at a list of all versions of SAFE:www.site and
choose for himself which version he chooses to view.
This version of DNS would prevent squatting, lost domain names, and
domains being controlled by the rich. This version of DNS would also be
fully autonomous and completely free. Most importantly this version of
DNS would allow everyone to be equal and allow democracy determine what
site is on top.
