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by BrendanEich 2481 days ago
I will be brief, as replies growing ever longer is a bad condition. Also I do not want to argue about imponderables.

I’m aware of Namecoin, whose Wikipedia page says

“A 2015 study found that of the 120,000 domain names registered on Namecoin, only 28 were in use.[12]

Onename co-founder Muneeb Ali on 12 September 2015 at the Blockstack Summit 2015 stated that the Namecoin network is not decentralized and the mining group Discus Fish controls 60-70% of its hashing power.”

I was at the 2015 Blockstack Summit and can vouch.

I already noted we will distribute if not decentralize publishers verification. Namecoin can’t do YouTube or other UGC accounts, as we do. Handshake might pan out for domains, we are in touch. In our current Gemini phase we have to comply with laws, but we won’t kick out or unverify a site or channel based on legal content it hosts. Our rep would be trashed if we did.

This may be where we part company. I’m well aware of conflicts of interest and the difference between intentions and outcomes from Mozilla and prior experience. Brave nevertheless has put its reputation at stake, with open source and incremental work to decentralize as much as possible. We may fail for lots of reasons, but going bad and trying to steal from our users is highly unlikely. It would be quickly defeated. This is by design.

1 comments

We were never really likely to reach any agreement, so I'm fine with parting ways as amicably as is possible given that we disagree so fundamentally. I really do wish you the best; I hope I'm wrong and that you succeed in a way that's good for users.