[walrus01]

> - TLDs aren't sold for a set price. There's a vickrey auction which awards the TLD to the highest bidder. This creates a better distribution of names than selling at a set price or to the first buyer

for real money, USD or EUR or such? where does this money go? or do you have to first mine some cryptocoin, or buy it with real money, and it then goes to the entity 'namebase'?

scroll down here to the 'how it works': https://www.namebase.io/

this quite honestly looks really sketchy to me. I'd much rather take my chances with registering a domain name among the myriad of ICANN root nameserver gTLDs and ccTLDs than buy some weird, obscure cryptocoin, which can then be used to buy 'domain names' that only 0.000001% of the client devices presently operating on the planet can successfully resolve into IPs.

https://learn.namebase.io/starting-from-zero/buy-hns

all of this just looks like somebody has grafted 'blockchain' and 'crypto coins' onto the same alternative root DNS ideas that failed twenty years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

[troquerre]

Great question. All Handshake names are registered with HNS through the auction process. Say you bid 1000 HNS on a name and I bid 900 HNS. You'd win that name and pay 900 HNS (the second highest bid price. Importantly, that fee doesn't go to Namebase or any other entity — the coins are burned on-chain so they go to no one.

[walrus01]

uhhh, so I'm looking on the website right now, and it wants a scan of my passport or photo ID for the privilege of buying a virtual cryptocoin, that can be used for purchasing domain names almost nobody can currently resolve, which vanishes into thin air after the purchase? am I getting that right?

"Purchasing HNS with USD is currently limited to those with a US passport or ID."

[troquerre]

Namebase is a service built on top of Handshake similar to how Coinbase builds on top of Bitcoin. It's an incorporated company that has to follow normal AML/KYC laws like other onramps. You don't have to go through Namebase to get HNS. Also, you can buy HNS with BTC without KYCing on Namebase. You can't sell or transfer the HNS without KYCing but you can still register names and transfer the names to other wallets without providing any passport info.

[mcdevilkiller]

Can you explain how that works?