Handshake: Decentralizing DNS to Improve the Security of the Internet
It still seems bizarre to me that this system lets people register arbitrary TLDs.  If nothing else, sooner or later a new ICANN gTLD will conflict with a Handshake registration.  At that point, Handshake will no longer be a backwards compatible extension of the existing DNS, so systems will have to choose one or the other.  Maybe the Handshake authors think that when that day comes (and it's probably not that far off), Handshake will already have achieved enough popularity that operating systems and browsers will choose Handshake instead of ICANN.  Somehow, I doubt it...<p>Imagine IPv6, but if it was somehow designed to squat on top of the IPv4 namespace, so that switching to IPv6 would cause existing addresses to start pointing somewhere else.  That's pretty much the situation Handshake has chosen to be in.<p>Not to mention that allocating TLDs<p>- confuses non-technical users ("what do you mean, there's no dot in the address?")<p>- conflicts with the choice of most browsers to unify the address and search bar (if I type <i>refrigerators</i> and press enter, I want a search results page, not the homepage of whoever registered the TLD 'refrigerators')<p>- may conflict with other non-standard domain name systems, including special-purpose TLDs like .onion – though they've at least reserved the existing ones, so it would only be a problem for not-yet-developed systems<p>It's strange, because I want to support decentralized name systems, and Handshake seems better designed than some of the previous attempts, but that one decision makes it seemingly guaranteed to fail.