1. I want a project like Handshake to be successful as well, and I agree it has a long way to go - the trade-offs are numerous, high-magnitue, and (sadly) opaque.
But also,
2. Having seen first-hand how these things take shape over long periods of time (the second decade of Bitcoin's existence is just getting started), Handshake needs help, is designed to be flexible, and you can help. In fact, I'd argue you already are helping, and in ways the average crypto-native community member trumpeting blind-eyed optimism - is not. :)
You raise some extremely good points here, and you're right, the trade offs are massive, partially due to how early the project is.
My view is that maturity of the project will bring some of the answers everyone is looking for.
As an anecdote, the first name auctions are actually ending in the next 48h.
Mean bids for early names (a few hundred) from the last time I looked in a cli were under 10 HNS, so under 5 USD at current prices.
.coin for low thousands of USD.
.11 for low hundreds of USD.
So that may give you a bit of an early view of what the prices are looking like. All subject to change of course because the auctions are not done yet.
For what it's worth, as someone enthusiastic about Handshake, crypto, and decentralized systems in general...I can totally empathize with the irritation you've expressed here. There's so much noise out there and 2017-2018 blockchain projects are notorious for over-promising on vague and impossible things, and then fading to nothing when the impossible things turn out to actually be impossible.
One thing I'd like to emphasize: Handshake's community may be what ends up being the differentiator against ICANN, less so anything financial or crypto related. I think that is what Rasengan is trying to accomplish here: build a true grassroots effort to work together to make Handshake a real contender. Because many of the readers here already have a piece of the network (majority of the coin supply being given not to investors, but Foss developers).
The simple notion that skilled, knowledgeable, opinionated, and generative individuals can have an outsized impact when raising concerns like this can be very powerful. Because it's an open network, many, many things are malleable, even economics/pricing/miner influence.
Decentralization has it's trade-offs. As Steve Waldman likes to say: "it's powerful at the edges, where Hayekian information flows can cover the blindspots of centralized efficiency".
Have you built/coded/made/delivered things to other people? Being on the other side of the table, so to speak, may help - as receiving their criticisms (and knowing internally why you didn't think of making it better, or knew but didn't have time/funding/certainty) can give a window into what was going on when you see examples of poor design. In a way, it's narrowing the window of "indefensibility".
In the same vein, you could consider learning more about why the poor design decisions are the way they are. At all levels (from building and city UX to individual products), there are myriad uncertainties and trade-offs when building something.
Some commenters are gesturing at to mental health issues - I don't know you well enough to feel comfortable with making a judgment like that, but on some level, if this is bothering you deeply, anger and depression may be symptoms of a deeper mental health issue: this might help!
https://ncase.me/mental-health/#toc_4
I'm not a member of the Handshake team, and I don't have control over what comments get posted. This is a Show HN - I am sharing something I have helped make, that other people can play with. That was my only intention, and I've atttempted to follow the guidelines here: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
That said, you are probably right. It doesn't surprise me that there is a lot of Handshake-related activity on HN right now. The project was conceived over two years ago, and today marks its second week of existence and the first day that people can actually try it out. Respectfully, is it possible that most of this is genuine interest/excitement in a new project instead of, as you put it, "PR astroturfing"?
It looks to me like a lot of discussion about the viability/usefulness of Handshake itself, which I have no problem with; the post sparked a discussion, and that's cool with me. There are a couple of things about Bob I'd like to state, just so it's here for future readers, as I had hoped to answer questions about the software.
1. Bob is an electron application that also is a Handshake resolver and full node - you can find these projects at:
http://github.com/handshake-org
2. We're looking for contributors and help of all kinds! Like any other open-source project, bug reports, suggestions, and contributions are very much welcome. Personally, my concerns as an engineer are around the scalability of the UI (electron can be hard to work with) when many (possibly hundreds) of domains are being watched or bid on. This is behaviour I believe is possible to see, from observing early internet domainers.
3. Like many non-custodial 'wallet' projects, it is meant to be a reasonable alternative to exchange custody, but we don't provide any guarantees as the user is responsible for self-custody. We intend to add hardware wallet support in the future. The goal is for the average person to have an easier time working with Handshake and Handshake names, by using Bob instead of a cli.
4. Bob is maintained by Kyokan, and I am the CEO there. It is not maintained by the Handshake team, and there is no Handshake foundation or business that runs the project. Kyokan is a separate software engineering consultancy that is working on multiple projects - we are also not a part of the Handshake team. Our contact info for security disclosures is in the repo.
5. Name Auctions and Airdrop claims on Handshake's mainnet start today (in under 8 hours), so it felt appropriate to share this repo, which we've spent a lot of time and effort working on. One can also find details about this in the repo, but we all hope you have a good time using the software!
Again, we're looking for feedback and suggestions. Even in the process of making this post, I found a few bugs, filed them and made minor improvements to the documentation. Thanks for reading!
> I find the words confusing [1] and incompatible [2][3].
1 - for Handshake, VCs are 'used' primarily as a signal to price the coins - like in Bitcoin, the asset having a price helps on many dimensions, for example, security (miners mine it).
2 - in Handshake, unlike most VC projects and startups - the capital raised was not used to pay salaries or enrich the developers building it - development was funded by other means. This is what is meant by "one-way non-destructive 'proof-of-burn'" -> in fact, it's not really a burn but a generative action since funds were donated to FOSS projects that put the capital to use!
If the chain benefits people, the sponsors are likely to profit. Early in the life of any public protocol, there will be some discovery process while word gets out and early use cases are tested: for public blockchains, that process includes price discovery.
I don't think that means the sponsors of the protocol are entitled to profit: they also took risk by putting up initial capital. The downside is capped in that if the project doesn't go anywhere and the coin goes to 0, FOSS projects that received $10.6mm benefitted.
I get that this looks very weird from the perspective of someone who’s been around since the early days of internet mass adoption. ICANN is basically a US-controlled bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are something that we’ve had for a long time and know the pros and cons of. And in fact ICANN has done a remarkably great job of what can only be described as a job from hell—coordinating the interests of a bajillion conflicting parties in one of the worlds most valuable digital assets.
That said, I hope you won’t write this off just because it looks weird. After all, the internet itself looked extremely weird for years (and arguably was at its most fun and interesting during that weird period.)
Handshake solves some real problems with the existing domain root zone system. Perhaps most interestingly to you, it trivially makes certificate pinning decentralized, and relieves us of the need to trust an increasingly obviously untrustworthy set of CAs. Further, it lets people hold domains anonymously, and creates something much more akin to actual ownership than the sort of “at the whim of the crown” perpetual renting that is available under ICANN.
Finally, handshake was designed from the ground up to be maximally compatible with the existing ICANN system. While we’ve identified serious problems with that system, we also have huge respect for it, and are well aware that for the near future Handshake’s usefulness will be very dependent on it being a “yes, and” rather than an “either, or”
Anyway, hopefully you can look past the novelty and weirdness of what we’re proposing and evaluate it substantively—your feedback would be immensely valuable
Sir, with all due respect, we've reached the limits of core internet protocols. The internet is a different beast than it was in the past, and to maximize the experience and capabilities of the internet, we need to look further.
Protocols designed today should not look like protocols designed 40+ years ago, lest we failed to progress.
That being said, at the end of the day, the protocol in Handshake is DNS. Handshake really just takes the torch from ICANN moving forward.
If only we knew about this technology instead of giving control of the root zone to the US. :/
