I am describing a usage that is explicitly not like that. A usage that has nothing to do with art. The concept of “NFT” is not somehow inextricably tied to spending ridiculous amounts of money on pictures of apes, it’s a general technology.
This is a perfect illustration of the problem here. People are lamenting about difficult it is to come up with a truly decentralized method of owning domain names that can’t be commandeered by authorities or big business, a system to do exactly that already exists, but it’s based on a technology that people have such an extreme prejudice about that they’d rather downvote anyone who tries to explain it and go back to helplessly lamenting.
What is the NFT component offering that I don’t get from the myriad of other excellent DNS services (many of which are FLOSS) that grant me reliable DNS over HTTPS/other privacy elements? What is the NFT part accomplishing that wasn’t being done prior?
Full decentralization and censorship resistance. In the case of DNS services there’s still an organization of some kind that you’re having to trust to not mismanage your registration. Both now in their current form and in any future form the organization may take.
ENS, on the other hand, is just a smart contract running on Ethereum. Its behaviour is programmed, not dependent on any human decision making. To censor it you’d need to block Ethereum as a whole.
How does your FLOSS software solve the Byzantine Generals problem? If two different people want to use the same domain name, how is it determined who gets it? These are the things that blockchains contribute a solution to.
It’s not enough that the software that everything’s running on is free/libre. Determining who gets a scarce resource (unique names) is the real difficulty here.
Call me a Luddite, call me ignorant, the simple answer is we don’t need to solve the Byzantine generals problem for privacy because we are able to work indecently I.e. if it’s floss we can compile ourselves. I don’t need to trust anyone when I can vet the code and roll my own with it.
TL;DR: the Byzantine general problem isn’t a problem.
It isn’t a problem when you’re just running software on your own computer and have no need to communicate with anyone else.
But that’s not the case for domain names. It wouldn’t work at all if we each had our own private little parallel universe, it defeats the whole purpose of a domain name system. We all need to agree on which names are associated with which IP addresses.
I’m not trying to promote blockchains as a one-size-fits-all universal solution for every problem. That’s silly, no technology is a universal solution for every problem. Blockchains are very good at solving a specific subset of problems, and DNS names IMO is one of those. When you need everyone to agree on a particular fact and you don’t want to designate some particular authority to be “in charge” of validating that fact then that’s exactly what a blockchain is for.
I am describing a usage that is explicitly not like that. A usage that has nothing to do with art. The concept of “NFT” is not somehow inextricably tied to spending ridiculous amounts of money on pictures of apes, it’s a general technology.
This is a perfect illustration of the problem here. People are lamenting about difficult it is to come up with a truly decentralized method of owning domain names that can’t be commandeered by authorities or big business, a system to do exactly that already exists, but it’s based on a technology that people have such an extreme prejudice about that they’d rather downvote anyone who tries to explain it and go back to helplessly lamenting.
Then please show us a valid usage currently occurring.
I just did. The ENS system, a decentralized replacement for DNS. That’s what started this subthread.
What is the NFT component offering that I don’t get from the myriad of other excellent DNS services (many of which are FLOSS) that grant me reliable DNS over HTTPS/other privacy elements? What is the NFT part accomplishing that wasn’t being done prior?
Full decentralization and censorship resistance. In the case of DNS services there’s still an organization of some kind that you’re having to trust to not mismanage your registration. Both now in their current form and in any future form the organization may take.
ENS, on the other hand, is just a smart contract running on Ethereum. Its behaviour is programmed, not dependent on any human decision making. To censor it you’d need to block Ethereum as a whole.
FLOSS software is not dependent on trusting an organization. That’s a significant part of the appeal.
What else?
How does your FLOSS software solve the Byzantine Generals problem? If two different people want to use the same domain name, how is it determined who gets it? These are the things that blockchains contribute a solution to.
It’s not enough that the software that everything’s running on is free/libre. Determining who gets a scarce resource (unique names) is the real difficulty here.
Call me a Luddite, call me ignorant, the simple answer is we don’t need to solve the Byzantine generals problem for privacy because we are able to work indecently I.e. if it’s floss we can compile ourselves. I don’t need to trust anyone when I can vet the code and roll my own with it.
TL;DR: the Byzantine general problem isn’t a problem.
It isn’t a problem when you’re just running software on your own computer and have no need to communicate with anyone else.
But that’s not the case for domain names. It wouldn’t work at all if we each had our own private little parallel universe, it defeats the whole purpose of a domain name system. We all need to agree on which names are associated with which IP addresses.
I’m not trying to promote blockchains as a one-size-fits-all universal solution for every problem. That’s silly, no technology is a universal solution for every problem. Blockchains are very good at solving a specific subset of problems, and DNS names IMO is one of those. When you need everyone to agree on a particular fact and you don’t want to designate some particular authority to be “in charge” of validating that fact then that’s exactly what a blockchain is for.
So then nothing related to NFTs at all but instead a specific application of a specific blockchain…
An ENS name is represented by a token that follows the ERC-721 standard. It is literally an NFT.