[BluSyn]

This provides a replacement for the root zone and not does not directly include subdomains. In DNS terms this is like registering a TLD. So if you own "companyx.com" domain, you could register "companyx" on handshake. Once you own this domain you can use your private key associated to set your name servers / other DNS settings, so subdomains could fallback to using existing DNS resolution, or this could resolve directly to a website.

With your private key you can also do interesting things like verify your subdomains with signatures ala DNSSEC or verify your own SSL certs without CAs.

The paper also mentions future improvements that could see each TLD using a side-chain (like plasma) to manage and possibly sell their own subdomains. This could also give each TLD owner more control over their own "consensus rules" for their particular TLD.

There are a lot more possibilities here, some are covered in the paper, many more are still to be explored.

Super excited for this project!

[iforgotpassword]

I'm curious how this would work out at scale. Would everyone just get a long descriptive TLD and then use that directly? While that would technically work I imagine it would confuse people who are used to treat the address bar of the browser primarily as the search box. So I'd enter "flowers" and expect a Google search for flowers, but since the TLD flowers exists and resolves to something you end up on some dude's blog. The alternative would be to use the www subdomain, but apart from looking odd (www.flowers? Something my mom could accidentally come up with, forgetting the .com - so maybe not that bad after all...) since we're not used to that now, it also reverses the current trend of dropping the www.

So of looks like this could also mean some changes in how we actually use the web, not just how DNS is managed.

[pera]

That's a relatively new UI behavior popularized by Google Chrome. If you use Firefox, for instance, you can have two text boxes: one for the URL and another one for searching.

[lugg]

Chrome already handles this: if you want the domain enter in the protocol - https://

If you want to search leave it off.

On top of that Chrome already has the ability to redirect you straight to the domain if it is well defined. I can't imagine it difficult to move that logic to google redirects instead.

e.g. "test.vm" goes to a google search despite being url format. "test.dev" goes to domain.

[iforgotpassword]

The point is not whether there is a technical solution to that or not.

"I'll prefix the domain with https:// so I will directly establish a secure connection because leaving it out implicitly means plain http, which makes me vulnerable to mitm attacks" - nobody outside tech, ever

And it wouldn't be any different here. Over the last decade we've been so focused on dumbing down tech enough so that it's accessible to pretty much anyone on the planet. It will be very hard to reverse this trend. Even just adding a trailing slash is cumbersome. I can only imagine how many million man hours we'd have to waste worldwide to explain that to the average Joe and their mom. Just remembering how many times I've seen people type a backslash instead of a slash in URLs, this will be fun.

[fowl2]

trailing slash works and is easier to type ;)