BitDNS and Generalizing Bitcoin

[kiba]

At any rate, do we have enough information that's agreed so that the core hackers can develop right now?

[em3rgentOrdr]

Could ip addresses themselves be managed by this system?  The ipchain would prevent anyone having duplicate addresses. This removes central control of ip address allocation and the ability to track individual machines.

Having ip address themselves be managed by a bitcoin-like system is a very interesting idea...

I never liked how the government and major corporations get to dish out vast swaths of the ip spectrum by dictate and privilege...

Ipv6 has a privacy issue doesn't it?   They stuffed ipv4 because address allocation became a scarce resource by bad management.

Is this privacy issue because ipv6 address will embed your MAC address?

IPv6, on the other hand, has 128 bits of address space, enough to provide a billion-billion addresses for each square meter of the earth's surface. How one could ever route that many addresses is an interesting question, but at least IPv6 will never run out.

As you might expect, the address field is so huge that the IETF didn't know how to assign it. So, in a move to get buy-in from established industry standards bodies, the right-most 64 bits were designated to contain EUI-64 format information. This is used by the IEEE to assign Ethernet addresses, which are normally not transmitted outside a user's LAN.

Included in EUI-64 are two interesting pieces of information: the registered manufacturer of your NIC card and your 48-bit Ethernet address. Surprise! Every packet you send out onto the public Internet using IPv6 has your fingerprints on it. And unlike your IP address under IPv4, which you can change, this address is embedded in your hardware. Permanently.

Does .dnc = domain name coins?

We could co-opt the democratic national convention lmao.

LOLFEST!  

Exactly.  My points exactly.  The reason for halving bitcoins over time does not really exist for bitdnscoins.

Wondering aloud even more, what need do we have for a fractional bitdnscoin?  I could imagine having a little bit of "change" but is there going to be any need for more than about three or four decimal places?

I agree...there is not as much reason for fractional bitdnscoins. That just complicates the algorithm and operation.  Making bitdnscoin be simple unitary entities is much simpler and easy to understand, so it will increase the likelihood of widespread adoption.  Simpler is better.  Computer hardware and software like things simple.

This is essentially the same issue just thought through from another perspective.  Right now I think it is about 100 million "bitcoins" to the smallest unit as defined in the Bitcoin protocol.   We really don't need that many decimal places even for trade purposes.  I still like the uint64 structure used in the Bitcoin protocol, but with a mild sort of inflation happening to the currency (relative to Bitcions) I don't see any major deflationary pressure pushing the value down like I see for Bitcoins.  Again, I am not an economist and this is going to take some hard economic theory and guessing which way even this currency might go in that perspective.  The only other "currency" to make a real comparison about here is the coins on the test network, and the main thing there is that those coins aren't being traded... which makes even that a bad example.

Could you clarify?  Are you talking about because bitcoins have a limited number of digits that it can be divided into (according to the algorithm), that therefore 1 bitcoin could be instead thought of a ~million mini nano-bitcoins that are of fundamental unit of trading size?

Anything is better than buying another domain from godaddy .

Awesome!  NO need for the middle man!  rent

This brings up another interesting point: most people will not need to have to pay the yearly ~$10 rent to their domain name provider, if they generate the bitdnscoin themselves.  Of course, this does not abolish rent on domain names, as there will be of course some mega bitdnscoin miners will speculate to purchase domain names they think will be in high demand, and will then rent out the popular domains they own.

[Hal]

Whats the general plan here? No reduction in names/block I assume? Won't this make the first blocks incredible valuable and later blocks less valuable as the goodness of remaining names declines? Maybe it should start really low (1?) and move up gradually to a stable amount (100?)?

This was on another thread but is relevant here. It is true, the first domain name is likely much more valuable than the millionth. So even if we don't reduce the number of DCC per block, the value will decrease much like Bitcoin does by halving the block reward every two years. That means transaction fees might have to rise substantially over time.

Is it worth considering to increase the block creation rate above 6 per hour? If we generate blocks every 5 minutes or even every 2-3 minutes instead of every 10, that would be another way to speed up domain name availability.

[em3rgentOrdr]

At any rate, do we have enough information that's agreed so that the core hackers can develop right now?

Well before starting coding, let's make sure we have the protocol clearly written out.  For instance, are we going to take my suggestion of using unitary, non-fractional, bitdnscoins where 1 block == 1 bitdnscoin, instead of having the number of bitdnscoins per block start at 50 and half every few years?  Also, there is no need for fractional bitdnscoins since it doesn't make too much sense to own one-tenth of a domain name.  Keep in mind that people can use fiat money or even bitcoins when trading unitary bitdnscoins, incase they need to make a trade of two domain names with unequal subjective valuations.

[Anonymous]

At any rate, do we have enough information that's agreed so that the core hackers can develop right now?

Well before starting coding, let's make sure we have the protocol clearly written out.  For instance, are we going to take my suggestion of using unitary, non-fractional, bitdnscoins where 1 block == 1 bitdnscoin, instead of having the number of bitdnscoins per block start at 50 and half every few years?  Also, there is no need for fractional bitdnscoins since it doesn't make too much sense to own one-tenth of a domain name.  And, keep in mind, people can use fiat money or even bitcoins when trading unitary bitdnscoins, incase they need to make a trade of two domain names with unequal subjective valuations.

+1 on that.

[Anonymous]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46003.html

For motivation 

[kiba]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46003.html

For motivation 

I RAGE.

[em3rgentOrdr]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1210/46003.html

For motivation 

I RAGE.

Oh god.  I try not to read the news...it just makes me angry.

White House intellectual property czar Victoria Espinel said Monday that the Internet community should “expect more” pre-emptive action as the administration combats online copyright infringement — especially the illegal copying and sale of pharmaceutical drugs.

So now we will all have to pay rent for an artificial government-imposed monopoly on life-saving pharmaceutical drugs, just so that we can live longer.  Intellectual Property => have to pay rent for your body.  IP == slavery.  Just because someone is the first to file a patent on a lifesaving drug, doesn't give him the right to exclude others from reverse engineering or independently discovering and producing that lifesaving drug.

[Anonymous]

Those are the stakes on the table people.

[kiba]

Remember, we can't let those .p2p dudes beat us to the punch!

[Hal]

Well before starting coding, let's make sure we have the protocol clearly written out.  For instance, are we going to take my suggestion of using unitary, non-fractional, bitdnscoins where 1 block == 1 bitdnscoin, instead of having the number of bitdnscoins per block start at 50 and half every few years?  Also, there is no need for fractional bitdnscoins since it doesn't make too much sense to own one-tenth of a domain name.  Keep in mind that people can use fiat money or even bitcoins when trading unitary bitdnscoins, incase they need to make a trade of two domain names with unequal subjective valuations.

I'm not sure how it would work to only create one coin per block. Would this only buy the creation of one domain name?

The reason I like the idea of fractional coins is it would give more flexibility in transaction fees. If it costs one coin to register a domain, it might make sense that a good size for the transaction fee would be fractional.

[kiba]

I'm not sure how it would work to only create one coin per block. Would this only buy the creation of one domain name?

The reason I like the idea of fractional coins is it would give more flexibility in transaction fees. If it costs one coin to register a domain, it might make sense that a good size for the transaction fee would be fractional.

Umm, each coin stand for one domain.

However, I don't think we need transaction fee. This is not bitcoin after all.

The incentive for 50 coins each block they generate ARE the transaction fee. Maybe?

I am worried about people who spam change to the DNS database?

[RHorning]

Whats the general plan here? No reduction in names/block I assume? Won't this make the first blocks incredible valuable and later blocks less valuable as the goodness of remaining names declines? Maybe it should start really low (1?) and move up gradually to a stable amount (100?)?

This was on another thread but is relevant here. It is true, the first domain name is likely much more valuable than the millionth. So even if we don't reduce the number of DCC per block, the value will decrease much like Bitcoin does by halving the block reward every two years. That means transaction fees might have to rise substantially over time.

Is it worth considering to increase the block creation rate above 6 per hour? If we generate blocks every 5 minutes or even every 2-3 minutes instead of every 10, that would be another way to speed up domain name availability.

One of the reasons to maintain the 10 minute interval between blocks is because of network latency from distant node in terms of "hops" between nodes.  If you shorten the interval you risk more "collisions" between nodes that may have simultaneously created a "successful block".  In turn that also can make even longer "chains" start to compete against each other.

In other words keeping the 10 minute interval may be a very good idea or even increasing the interval could have benefits.  I know of at least some blocks even with this average that have time stamps which even go "negative" where the successive block is timestamped a few seconds before the previous block.  More likely it was created at almost the same time but the other block literally was created a matter of a few seconds earlier.

I would like to put in perhaps a more continuous or shorter interval between difficulty adjustments, but then again there are some network attacks which are thwarted by the two-week readjustment system.

At any rate, do we have enough information that's agreed so that the core hackers can develop right now?

Well before starting coding, let's make sure we have the protocol clearly written out.  For instance, are we going to take my suggestion of using unitary, non-fractional, bitdnscoins where 1 block == 1 bitdnscoin, instead of having the number of bitdnscoins per block start at 50 and half every few years?  Also, there is no need for fractional bitdnscoins since it doesn't make too much sense to own one-tenth of a domain name.  Keep in mind that people can use fiat money or even bitcoins when trading unitary bitdnscoins, incase they need to make a trade of two domain names with unequal subjective valuations.

The exchanges might really appreciate at least some fractional quantities to play with, although that could also be internal to the exchange itself.  The real advantage is for some granularity in terms of competing miners which might want to snag a few additional registrations.  It would also help in terms of setting up a per-kilobyte charge for people throwing stuff into the coin transactions too.  Attacks on the network can also happen through filling up coin transaction information with useless junk, and charging a fee for that can help stop or at least slow down such a flood attack and at least put cost to such an attack that must be borne by the person making the transaction.  Such a charge may require at least some fractional coins, even if it isn't nanocoins necessarily.

[kiba]

The exchanges might really appreciate at least some fractional quantities to play with, although that could also be internal to the exchange itself.  The real advantage is for some granularity in terms of competing miners which might want to snag a few additional registrations.  It would also help in terms of setting up a per-kilobyte charge for people throwing stuff into the coin transactions too.  Attacks on the network can also happen through filling up coin transaction information with useless junk, and charging a fee for that can help stop or at least slow down such a flood attack and at least put cost to such an attack that must be borne by the person making the transaction.  Such a charge may require at least some fractional coins, even if it isn't nanocoins necessarily.

Let me this straight: so we use fractional coins to prevent network spamming? Or is it bitcoin?

[chaord]

If we could dump this idea of another currency, I'd be all for it.  I just don't see how to do that though.

I'm going to put my thinking cap on here, because I think ideally if we could do this under one umbrella (either by expanding bitcoin to encompass domainchain or vice versa) it will strengthen both projects.

[RHorning]

Umm, each coin stand for one domain.

However, I don't think we need transaction fee. This is not bitcoin after all.

The incentive for 50 coins each block they generate ARE the transaction fee. Maybe?

I am worried about people who spam change to the DNS database?

Coin transfer transaction fees are also important here as well.  It allows the cost to be scaled with the size of the network and note that there will be coin transactions in this network as well.  There will be coin transfers independent of domain registrations as there will at least be transfers to and from exchanges and likely from miners to people wanting to make registrations directly.  There may also be other applications that use these coins that haven't been developed yet.

The "50 coins" they may collect are not going to be generated coins but rather fees collected from processing domain records, presuming they are getting 50 domain registrations in a single block.

The only role that generated coins play is strictly to bootstrap the exchanges.  You have to get the coins from somewhere, and giving them to miners is as good of a way as I can imagine without simply creating them all in the genesis block and then handing them out like the Bitcoin faucet until that feature runs out of coins.

Let me this straight: so we use fractional coins to prevent network spamming? Or is it bitcoin?

This is another currency that is essentially identical to Bitcoin, but with a few tweaks and miners more concentrated on working with domain records.  We could put this into the main Bitcoin protocol, but then we would have to change the Bitcoin miners as well.

[kiba]

This is another currency that is essentially identical to Bitcoin, but with a few tweaks and miners more concentrated on working with domain records.  We could put this into the main Bitcoin protocol, but then we would have to change the Bitcoin miners as well.

So if you spent a coin to register a domain, then it stay frozen until the domain expire?

[RHorning]

If we could dump this idea of another currency, I'd be all for it.  I just don't see how to do that though.

I'm going to put my thinking cap on here, because I think ideally if we could do this under one umbrella (either by expanding bitcoin to encompass domainchain or vice versa) it will strengthen both projects.

It could be put into the Bitcoin protocol itself, but keep in mind that would require changing the miners in a way that would also have to set up the rules for accepting and rejecting the domain registrations.  It also makes this a hack onto Bitcoins to be performing tasks that aren't financial transactions.  Some Bitcoin miners wouldn't be willing to participate and may end up rejecting blocks with the domain information buried in the block.  This gets back to burying the data into the transaction record itself, and then you get problems again trying to decide what blocks get rejected and which ones don't.  On top of all that, it makes this a one-time only change and is not extensible to incorporating other ideas that may be similar.

Really, the only way this is going to work is for a completely separate block chain for the domain data.  That implies a second currency.

If we could get some hooks into Bitcoin that would open up some additional data types which could be put into the Merkle tree for the blocks and have some way for a miner to bootstrap verification rules for those additional types, perhaps we could put it into the main Bitcoin chain as well.  We would also have to come up with some sort of scripting language that would be used to "verify" those extra datablocks sort of like the current scripting language being used to verify coin transactions.  Would that be worth some extra effort to make a "generic solution" that could be added to Bitcoin for this and other similar kinds of data types to be added to Bitcoin?

It would require a major network-wide upgrade regardless.  Coins wouldn't be lost, but older clients would have to be abandoned with an update of that nature.  Miners would receive any transaction fees for simply following those rules.

Another question here, and this is perhaps the most important:  Would Satoshi be interested in putting in these kind of extra hooks into Bitcoin?  By creating a separate currency that is essentially a fork of Bitcoin for a specific purpose, Satoshi's blessing is irrelevant other than coordinating the effort of the two projects to relay problems identified in the two efforts and to make sure fatal problems get updated in bother projects.  If we decide to put the data (even as a separate data structure) into Bitcoin, Satoshi needs to be in the middle of all of this discussion.  Bitcoin, as it currently exists, really doesn't deal with this kind of issue.

This is another currency that is essentially identical to Bitcoin, but with a few tweaks and miners more concentrated on working with domain records.  We could put this into the main Bitcoin protocol, but then we would have to change the Bitcoin miners as well.

So if you spent a coin to register a domain, then it stay frozen until the domain expire?

No, that coin is received by the miner processing the transactions and handled just like coin transaction fees are right now in Bitcoin.

[kiba]

No, that coin is received by the miner processing the transactions and handled just like coin transaction fees are right now in Bitcoin.

So domain name generation are limited by the velocity of miners spending, but then they have to generate a block to get the coin.

[chaord]

RHorning...thank you for the very detailed responses.  It's been helpful that you are so willing to lay down your logic so that some of us can play "catch up" as we wrap our heads around this project.

Satoshi needs to be in the middle of all of this discussion.  Bitcoin, as it currently exists, really doesn't deal with this kind of issue.

I completely agree here.  Even though his "blessing" is not necessary, it could potentially save a lot of time and effort if we can at least get Satoshi involved in the discussion.  Does anyone here have enough of a working relationship with Satoshi? I know he is quite evasive these days.