[prepend]

This seems like a neat idea but the economics are that of a for profit business, and I think we learned that handing domains to a for profit (NetworkSolutions) was a bad idea.

7% going to contributors and 7% going to financial backers is a pretty big incentive. [0]

I’d rather see this set up as a non profit foundation or a community driven trust and run in an OSS way for the financial elements. As it is, I don’t think we should create a decentralized network with such significant financial incentives.

[0] https://handshake.org/how-it-works

[glitch003]

Interesting. I suppose it's only a matter of time until someone forks it and changes or lowers those incentives?

But they will have to re-build the user base and since handshake.org is literally giving away $10m to build it's user base, it might be difficult.

[prepend]

I think registries like this are hard to fork because there is so much buy-in required from a critical mass of users for any change.

I think we are better off with some sort of community consensus protocol and the only benefit of giving away “$10m” is to gain even more money for the developers. Standards should be open or driven by a commodity cost model, not a “inventor gets rich” model. Their plan accounts for plans when the chain value is over $50B. That is unlikely, but it means there’s a model in the developers plans where $7B in value is held by the developers and investors.

DNS and other Internet standards never would have succeeded using compensation models like this. I can’t think of any RFCs that would have such payouts for the main contributors.