2 sats \ 7 replies \ @ursuscamp 30 Jan 2023 \ parent \ on: Bitcoin-enabled solution to DNS centralization bitcoin
If exclusivity is permanent, there's no defense against squatters and scammers, which is a directly contradictory problem, but also undesirable.
In a different comment, I proposed a "best effort" of first come first serve on names, the rough consensus of the network would allow people to individually ignore scammers and squatters and refuse to propagate their name updates, eventually crowding them out of the network.
I just believe that popularity prompt is bad UX. First come first serve must be the modus operandi until enough individuals act to counteract the network effects.
defense against squatters is simple in theory, make names expensive and nontransferable. no point in squatting on a name if it costs a lot and you can't sell it.
reply
If you can devise a scheme that does this without a separate, dedicated block chain, I would be interested in hearing that.
reply
once inscribed, names can be sent to a burn wallet instead of the user. they are essentially nontransferable from that point on. but can still be easily "looked up" for resolution. updates could be more complex but still doable. and burning the sats involved kind of increases the cost without increasing the price... so to speak.
reply
But how do you enforce that? Bitcoin doesn't recognize names natively. If I write a transaction that says "the name ursuscamp belongs to me, here's my pub key", what will stop you from also writing a transaction later that says "the name ursuscamp later belongs to me, here's my pubkey"?
The only answer I can think of is soft consensus, like first come first serve. Unless you can come up with some scheme that gets Bitcoin to treat names as native assets, such that if you attempt to publish a second transaction also claiming a name, nodes will reject that transaction as invalid.
We might just be talking about the same thing, since you're referring to inscriptions, which are themselves really just a social convention.
reply
I think we mean the same thing. it would have to be a social convention, yes. the OP was proposing ordinal inscriptions, so I ran with that method as a given.
I am not familiar enough with the bitcoin code to make any intelligent guess as to how it could be enforced on a protocol level, and I'm not sure I'd even want such a thing.
reply
Then I believe we would be in agreement.
reply
Totally agree on UX issue. I originally had the idea of "pinning" so that this UX pain only needs to happen on first visit. Still not ideal, though.
I also totally agree that permanent exclusivity suffers from an opposite problem.
reply