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by fitblipper 404 days ago
It seems like a centralized authority for DNS that must answer to some government is prone to censorship.

Would moving domain registration into a public Blockchain allow for a more resilient and democratized internet?

3 comments

If something doesn't work, fix it with Blockchain.
As the old regex joke goes, "now you have two problems".
idk, i think it would be cool to have a copy of every dns record on my hard drive
You can do that already now.
Kind of. You can get the nameservers (and glue records if available) for every domain under a TLD if the TLD makes their zone file available. See https://github.com/jschauma/tld-zoneinfo
Well kinda but that would be an incomplete snapshot. Versus a blockchain where every DNS record change is necessarily written into my copy.

IPNS is similar project that already exists.

more resilient and democratized internet

If you only said more democratized I might lean towards yes with some caveats but you included resilient and DNS is not just peoples workstations and cell phones. It is used by very big and complex systems that make vast numbers of changes every second. Trying to force all of that through blockchain would require a complete re-thinking of how blockchain and the internet work in my opinion. I would be happy to be proven wrong. Someone could try it but that someone would have to be a very big organization for any kind of canary test. The devil would be in the implementation details as to how this monster would scale and handle a myriad of failure scenarios. People would also need to be able to troubleshoot complex misconfigurations. It would take some serious battle hardening before a production revenue generating company would take a chance with it.

the Ethereum Name Service already exists and services this role just fine. Also the only bottleneck for Blockchain is writing to them. Reading them is free and easily available as everyone can have their own copy of the chain and there's already lots of RPC providers like Infura and Alchemy.
> Would moving domain registration into a public Blockchain allow for a more resilient and democratized internet?

No, you’d just get the protocol blocked and sanctioned.