I would like to be looped into this project. I think that something like BitDNS can provide the intrinsic "use value" for bitcoin. I'm a firm believe that bitcoin in its current state is a solution looking for a specific problem. Perhaps a distributed dns is that "problem." This is exciting!
There still are some technical challenges here that I am not completely sure how to solve. In this regard, all of the help we can get will be appreciated and there will certainly be some "heavy lifting" where I think there can be some good division of labor in terms of separate parts that can be worked on.
Major areas will include:
* GUI design - coming up with the visual appearance and organization for the project. Most GUI design is simply awful, and it is something I've struggled with over the course of decades and still don't get done very well.
* Networking communication - How the client will communicate with other nodes? Even that is something which can be sub-divided after a fashion, but it will be a crucial piece.
* Database organization and communication - Even choosing a database route isn't going to be easy, either from a "roll your own" to something like MySQL or BerkleyDB. Potentially this is something which could get into the terabyte range for storage requirements, so we do need to be careful on some of the decisions we make here.
* DNS communication - ideally what should happen is that the client would become a source of domain information that could be referenced with other DNS records. For a home office/small business this could be on the same computer but for some businesses or schools they could even put this in their server room as a part of the main domain resolver path for their network.
* Interfacing with the Bitcoin network - How will the usage of this software connect to the Bitcoin network, transfer payments from "registrants" to "registrars" (aka "miners"), and what is a "fair" way to make sure that the people receiving money are going to be paid?
* Thin client design - How can you set up something that would retrieve the "database" yet not be a miner? Is this even an issue?
Non technical issues include:
* Establishing Problem Domain - just what is it that this software needs to accomplish? Who would use it and why? What is it that they need?
* Potential Social Conflicts - What sort of "legal" requirements might there be for "domain registrations" and what do we do about them? Do we care? Even if we ignore the law in this case, what would most network users expect from a domain registration?
* Marketing - How do we sell this software so far as to get people to use it? How can publicity be spread about it once it becomes available. What sort of outlets are there which might be interested in using this. If we told a business they could run a domain server and make money (by "mining" registration applications) simply by having it in their server room, would that be something they might adopt?
* Finding "customers" for domain registration - This is more to the marketing, but with a concentration on just those who might want to use domain registration. Some of this is also going to be an issue in terms of breadth of the adoption of the concept, but what groups might be interested in using this as registration? Obviously bitcoin users would be an early adopter, but anybody else?
Some of these have some "milestones" that must be met before other things can happen, but at the same time there are things which can be done simultaneously. Any other ideas for things that might be facing this in terms of a breakdown of tasks?
