I firmly believe that the blockchain, and a lot of crypto stuff in general, is snake-oil, and a solution in search of a problem, but dns seems like a place where it could be useful. Am I wrong? As a blockchain-hater, I would love to be.
No it isn’t, because the way DNS work.
- you ask your dns server if it knows the adres for some website.
- if it doesn’t it’ll ask another node
- if it does, it will tell you.
So a dns server either knows the webadresses it serves, or it knows which way to point you for more info. This is a leveled arrangement, so there are some high level dns servers that basically divide the whole Internet in sections (11, if I members correctly). And they all have layers of subsidiaries, like a tree structure. The leaves of this tree know a few specific addresses, or else they send you up the tree and the node might send you down again, to a different leave.
If you would do this on block chain, you wouldn’t need the intermediate nodes anymore, but the leaves would contain all the information themselves. The leaves, in this case, would probably be a file on your computer and would basically contain the entire Internet. Anyways, the big problem with this isn’t size, but the linking. Blockchain only knows which nodes came before your node, not which nodes came after. Even if you did implement it like that, you’d have a massive list of nodes. Imagine you have an old ip address and you want to lookup a brand new website. You could possibly be sent through millions of nodes before you find what you’re looking for. The tree structure dns has now, cuts that down to maybe a dozen nodes, depending on what you’re looking for. You can actually how many nodes with traceroute, or online om dnschecker.org/online-traceroute
Bad bot!
Excuser moi?
Can you briefly describe how you’d fit the two together?
There is existing implementations, check .box and .eth (unless you already did).
The main problem with dns as is, is that its centralised.
What? No. What problem will will this solve?
Well, dns is centralised, icann controls it.
I agree that DNS is horribly centralized and outdated, but tech isn’t gonna solve this problem which is political. I think every TLD should be ran by a federation of independent worker co-ops managing each TLD autonomously. who then convene at a federation council to replace the functions of ICANN
letting people like Elon Musk control DNS should make it obvious why this is a horrible idea. most of those crypto people are fascists and/or “anarcho-capitalists”
If he can control it, then its not decentralised.
hence the inherent problem with crypto. you’re always gonna end up with fascist billionaires at the helm when you essentially implement a vote determined by how much bro-tokens you own.
I’m not aware of any blockchain implementation that isn’t just a reskin of late stage capitalism.
they call it “decentralized” when most of Bitcoin’s mining power is centralized in the hands of a few shadow companies and for the proof of stake model it’s centralized in the hands of a few wall street bros
DNS uses distributes hash tables, which is decentralized. Though, yes, there is centralization in terms of trusted entities able to issue domain names and top level domains, you can already host your own distributed and decentralized name servers
Generally, blockchain is really only helpful in very specific scenarios
- where there is no trust amongst actors (there is trust in dns, I trust you to tell me the details for your DNS records)
- immutability is important (dns records are regularly mutated, only the current state is important)
- and performance is unimportant (performance is critically important for dns)
