Notices by Mikołaj Hołysz (miki@dragonscave.space)

@kuba re: reading the data, there are some designs for DNS-like chains that allow you to be a lightweight client with no need to trust an intermediary. Essentially, you only need to download the headers of each block (which are much smaller than the blocks themselves), you download the rest on-demand. Having the headers (which contain the block hashes) ensures that nobody can tamper with the block contents without your knowledge.

@kuba Re: hacking, this is a fundamental dilemma, if your registrar has the ability to forcibly transfer your domain to somebody else, they can help recover it in case of a hack, but they can also disable it when their automated AI systems mistakenly flag it as suspicious.

There are ways to mitigate this problem. Handshake for example has a concept of "domain burning", if somebody steals a copy of your key and tries to transfer your domain to their own, you have some time (two weeks I think) to disable the domain completely, making it unavaiblable to both you and the hacker. This removes any financial incentives for domain hacking, as most people would rather lose their domain than have it go to a hacker.

There are also other designs where you have multiple parties that need to authorize a transfer. You could even design this in a way where you need a both your key and a registrar's key to transfer a domain to somebody else, but the registrar's key isn't allowed to make any changes to the domain without your express consent.

@kuba No.

A blockchain can provide a unique mapping of names to values. It's centralized in the sense that there's only one mapping and every network participant agrees on what a given name is mapped to, but decentralized in the sense that only authorized users (where the smart contract defines what is meant by "authorized") are allowed to change mappings.

THe reason such a system cannot possibly work without a cryptocurrency is that you need some incentive against scalpers taking all the names for themselves on day one. If names are completely free to acqquire, somebody is inevitably going to get all the interesting ones and then they won't be free to acquire any more.

@kuba This doesn't provide *unique* name-value mappings and requires users to either manually add the hosts they're interested in or set up delegation. This requires either a lot of effort or centralization.

In case anybody still believed that self-hosting is going to save them from tech companies taking their stuff down with no explanation or recourse: https://fwoof.space/@johann/112782861923747310

This stuff is why we *need* the blockchain, nobody has yet come up with any other system that our tech overlords cannot control.

The fediverse, with its reliance on DNS and TLS, is basically no less immune to any of this than X, Facebook, Instagram or any other centralized social media service.

@pgronkievitz W Inpoście się da, kind of https://github.com/alufers/inpost-cli

Jakby się ktoś serio uparł, to niewielkim wysiłkiem by się dało to spiąć np. z botem na Telegramie (bo tam jest fajne API i najłatwiej zrobić).