Decentralized naming and certificate authority on handshake hns

Decentralized naming and certificate authority

Handshake is a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol where  every peer is validating and in charge of managing the root DNS naming  zone with the goal of creating an alternative to existing Certificate  Authorities and naming systems. Names on the internet (top level  domains, social networking handles, etc.) ultimately rely upon  centralized actors with full control over a system which are relied upon  to be honest, as they are vulnerable to hacking, censorship, and  corruption. Handshake aims to experiment with new ways the internet can  be more secure, resilient, and socially useful with a peer-to-peer  system validated by the network's participants.

Handshake is an experiment which seeks to explore those new  ways in which the necessary tools to build a more decentralized  internet. Services on the internet have become more centralized  beginning in the 1990s, but do not fulfill the original decentralized  vision of the internet. Email became Gmail, usenet became reddit,  blog replies became facebook and Medium, pingbacks became twitter, squid  became Cloudflare, even gnutella became The Pirate Bay.  Centralization exists because there is a need to manage spam, griefing,  and sockpuppet/sybil attacks. Previous decentralized systems largely  stopped working due to spam. If it were more costly to grief on the  internet using decentralized systems, the need for trusted centralized  corporations to manage these risks decrease. Internet services and  platforms may benefit from building on top of a decentralized system  which is specifically designed for resilience against sybil attacks.
As we may redecentralize.

By running Handshake, one can participate in a decentralized open  naming platform secured by a decentralized peer-to-peer network.     

Read the project design notes
     Documentation here
     Initial code on GitHub 

• A base layer for the decentralized internet. The  internet is arranged in layers, to decentralize the internet, we need to  start at the lowest layers of the stack. Secure naming ensures user  agents are talking to the right endpoints.
• The place for minimal global consensus.  Decentralization is most successful if we have minimal areas to reach  complete global agreement. Names and signing certificates may be one of  the few (if only) places of global agreement for a decentralized web.  Handshake is an experimental structure for reaching that agreement via  software.
• True decentralization, no official singular Foundation, Committee, Corporation, or entities in permanent unitary control of the protocol.
• Economic incentives enable decentralized agreements to  form via a transparent name auction process. Without some kind of  economic cost function, one person could register all names. Economic  incentives enable decentralized sybil resistance which would otherwise  be centralized and corrupted.       
• Alternative to certificate authorities, using a decentralized trust anchor to prove domain ownership
• Distributed and permissionless zone file to which any participant has the right to add an entry or serve as host and validator
• Light clients via merkelized proofs and proof-of-work  allow for lightweight name resolutions and certificates. The initial  protocol enables cryptographic name proofs, with the potential for  decentralized proof lookups to be usually within the MTU limit.
• A platform for sybil resilience.  WoT can/should be  used as an augmentation, but it is often not a global agreement of  resources for individual decentralized services. By using Handshake  names, one can know that some kind of economic limits exist for the use  of the name. This can be leveraged whenever one is concerned about  resource exhaustion, and reaching global agreement on moderation alone  is too costly.

Majority ownership of HNS can be claimed by Free and Open Source Software contributors directly to the network itself on-chain.  Read more here.

Top github users and PGP WoT Strong Set are the primary set (along with several other communities). This list is not a "toplist of FOSS developers and advocates" and inclusion does not  imply that one is a top contributor, this was a list optimized towards  availability of scrapeable unique public keys, as the keys are claimed  in a decentralized way after the list was generated, and cannot be  modified after Handshake goes live without a subsequent hard-fork  allocation.

Handshake is a piece of software (and a loose consensus on agreement  of the software itself). This software's primary function is for people  to come to agreement on names and cryptographic keys authorized to  represent that names in a decentralized way. To do this in a  decentralized way, we need to prevent a single party from claiming all  the names. Therefore, a unit of account is needed to prevent that single  party from claiming all names.

Handshake uses a coin system for name registration. The  Handshake coin (HNS) is the mechanism by which participants transfer,  register, and update internet names. The community will be able to  initiate auctions and place bids for top-level domains using HNS or  trade their HNS as they see fit, with differing value per name.

Therefore, Handshake allocates the majority of its initial  coins towards the FOSS community with absolutely no obligation attached,  as it is this community most relevant with decentralized software and  tools. The goal of the initial design was to account for all possible  stakeholders. More info.

Handshake's incentive design assumptions relies upon Metcalfe's  Law (Beckstrom's Law, etc.). While Bitcoin's value is derived from it  being a costly store of value, Handshake's value is derived from its  network of users. Metcalfe's Law asserts that an increase in userbase  increases the value of the network (sub)exponentially. This means that  allocation of value to potential developers and users of this system be a  benefit to everyone, with network effect derived benefiting all users.