There are factions within crypto, some think the "end of history" looks like crypto replacing centralized systems. others (like myself) think those systems are complements and simply alternatives in the marketplace.
As to being adversarial... ICANN was allocated 1.2% of the total HNS supply, and all existing TLD owners (at the time of the snapshot) can claim their TLDs on chain. The icann allocation is 5.8% of the current circulating supply.
i suppose there could have been a way to give ICANN a blank check to modify the handshake namespace in perpetuity, but i suspect that might either be technically unworkable or just made the whole venture pointless.
the context for that comment is that handshake took a snapshot of the icann namespace. so any names icann adds or changes after the fact will conflict with the HNS namespace.
yeah. right now it's ~$0 since there's no fee competition, but as soon as the total names registered gets close to the limit (66 million) then the cost of renewall will go up and it will be costly to squat. there are 1.85 million names registered currently.
the way handshake addresses this problem is putting a cap on the total number of names that can be registered, and then users compete on fees in order to get their transaction mined to renew the name
I use it, and own a small portfolio of names on chain. "base" and "faq" are a couple of them. It's been pretty interesting to watch the ecosystem mature.
Just recently a small dev team released a desktop app that syncs name data to your local device and lets you browse sites with lookups to the handshake root before falling back to icann root https://impervious.com/fingertip.html
There are a few blockchain based solutions to this problem.
- Handshake
- ENS
- Namecoin
My favorite so far is Handshake - a fork of the bitcoin protocol with added support for covenants, which is how arbitrary names can be registered and associated with some 512 bytes of data. Example: https://hnsnetwork.com/names/proofofconcept which shows TXT and other records. ENS was previously my favorite, but the root protocol is secured by only a 7 person multisig. Namecoin is old and poorly designed in my opinion.
you only need hns.to if you haven't set up your system to resolve handshake names directly, or (theoretically) use a browser that has support baked in.
It's on Brave Browser's roadmap to resolve handshake DNS directly.
As to being adversarial... ICANN was allocated 1.2% of the total HNS supply, and all existing TLD owners (at the time of the snapshot) can claim their TLDs on chain. The icann allocation is 5.8% of the current circulating supply.
i suppose there could have been a way to give ICANN a blank check to modify the handshake namespace in perpetuity, but i suspect that might either be technically unworkable or just made the whole venture pointless.