Oddbean

This is a truly fascinating story: the possible disappearance of the beloved TLD .io because of some geopolitical event. I do recommend reading it, it's full of tasty details. However, this article reminded me of when, around 2012, I got excited with Namecoin, a fork of Bitcoin, that aimed to establish .bit as a new TLD outside of the ICANN-regulated DNS. I immediately purchased the domain clipperz.bit as an uncensorable, decentralized alternative to clipperz.com, the domain I was using back then for Clipperz, the online password manager we built in 2005 on the excitement of running strong cryptography right in the browser (still running and servicing users nowadays). As you may know, Namecoin failed to gain enough adoption and therefore browser manufacturers did not provide any support to resolve .bit domain names. Could Nostr succeed where Namecoin failed? Could Nostr become the layer that will eventually make ICANN and national registers irrelevant? https://every.to/p/the-disappearance-of-an-internet-domain?s=03

> Could Nostr succeed where Namecoin failed? Could Nostr become the layer that will eventually make ICANN and national registers irrelevant? Probably not. As of now, Nostr relies on ICANN. Not the protocol itself, strictly speaking, but rather the ecosystem. Even if we ignore this, however, Nostr doesn't actually address the issue at all. It's true that one could make a decentralized domain name using Nostr. It's also true that work has already been done regarding this. However, those domain names are not, and really cannot be, easy to remember. So I don't think Nostr solves this problem. The good news, however, is that we can still promote .bit domains, or domains which use a similar blockchain-based system. The fact that it's not been successful so far does not mean it cannot be. Nostr can still be useful to register domains which do not need to be easy to remember or to identify for a final user. The advantage over .bit, .eth or similar domains would be the fact that they could also be free of charge (because the supply of potential domains, all about equally as good, would be infinite).

Sadly, I was unable to find references to what I saw, but it's pretty trivial to think of such a system, although, again, domain names won't be mnemonic. For mnemonic names, there are already many solutions which have been developed, such as .BIT and .ETH domain, as well as others with different goals. There is also GNS, although I'm yet to study it: https://www.gnunet.org/en/gns.html

You are perfectly right. Actually, things are even worse: all .io domains may soon disappear for geopolitical reasons. Once, I hoped Namecoin/Bitcoin could give us a permissionless DNS, but it did not happen. Could Nostr be a new tool for that goal? I wrote more here: nostr:note12vy6ll7vg5vjepf5s3gyn7wajlwgg34efddlf2zcddr9r76h5caszg3frz