What do I call you, Naiman?
I don't mind. I nickname or real name. Whatever is easier for you to pronounce, because a
YAL is a bit difficult sometimes.
A YAL?
Yeah, I mean, a YAL, that's the name. I use Naiman because I live abroad and no one can
pronounce it.
Sorry?
Yeah.
Naiman seems a bit easier sometimes.
Peter, see a new audio?
Yeah.
Unmuted.
Unmuted?
Right.
Right. Your controls are here. You have 30 minutes to question a loud speaker.
Just join us and welcome to the UNS developer room. This is our final speaker for the day.
Naiman and he will talk to us about the history of blockchain and naming systems.
Okay. Thank you. Thanks everyone, you know, who stayed till the end. I imagine it was a
great, at least it was for me. I'm going to talk today about the history of, you know,
blockchain name systems. I'm Naiman or a YAL. I'm from Israel, but I live in Poland.
And, oh, that's fast. And I'm a mathematician, but I work on peer-to-peer websites in the
last few years. If you don't know what it is, don't worry, because the main important thing
regarding the talk is that those websites use blockchain name systems. So I had a chance
to talk with the developers of the main ones, even being engaged a bit in some of them,
and that's why I do this talk. This is some projects, but I did, which use, you know,
blockchain name systems. Don't focus on that, because, you know, it talks not about me.
I know that blockchain has a bad connotation, especially, I guess, in this thing.
I'm not here to change your mind.
I'm here to tell a story.
And the story begins in 2001, where a guy called
Zuko Wilcox sent a draft to his friends of some article
that he wrote, and it began with the words,
please do not propagate this information widely yet.
I'm still working on it.
Did they respect it?
Absolutely not.
This was propagated so hard that by now there is a Wikipedia
page on it called Zuko's Triangle.
Zuko's Triangle basically says that a name system,
there are three properties that a name system
can have or not have.
One of them is secure.
Secure means that two people cannot register the same name.
The other one is human meaningful,
which basically means you can choose which name you
registers out of the ones which are available.
And hopefully because you're human,
the name would have some meaning.
And the last one is decentralized,
which means that in order to register a name
or to verify a name, you can do it yourself
without needing someone else like a third party.
And Zuko's Triangle says that for any specific name system,
you can have at most two of those properties.
You cannot have the whole three.
Sorry.
Here are some examples.
You know, a name system that I guess everyone here know.
DNS.
DNS has human meaningful, for sure.
It's also safe.
It's not decentralized in the definition of Zuko's Triangle.
Public private key is safe.
Yes, it's secure.
Sorry.
Decentralized, yes.
You can generate yourself.
You can verify someone else on your own.
But it is human meaningless.
Most public keys are a monster.
And my favorite one, the state ID, which is safe.
But otherwise, it is neither decentralized
or human meaningful, which I think it's a shame.
I would love to be able to choose my state ID, but states.
Zuko's Triangle kind of was considered
to be true for the first decade of this millennium.
It was what I had that was not involved well known
within the name systems community.
But you can only have two.
And you shouldn't try to build one that has the whole three.
2009, Bitcoin invented.
And shortly afterwards, a year later,
in some of the Bitcoin IRC chats, people
started to say, hey, can we put name on a blockchain?
Now, this continued in chats.
There was a Bitcoin Talk forum.
At some point, the legendary Aaron Schwartz
heard about it.
And he wrote an article squaring the triangle, which
basically says, if we put names on a blockchain,
we can actually go around Zuko's Triangle
and can have a name system that have the whole three
properties.
This can be, you can argue if a blockchain is really
decentralized or not in the sense that the requirement was
that you can register and verify yourself, not
register and verify with a blockchain.
But for the sake of this talk, we
think about the blockchain as a big dump object.
It's a tool.
It does what you want.
I know it's not.
I know that each blockchain has its own pros and cons.
I'll be happy to argue about each event afterwards
in a beer with that right now.
Big dump object, by the way.
I'm a youth science fiction fan.
It's a term from science fiction.
It's a subgenre of books that have a big dump object.
It does something.
That's a Ringworld by Larry Neven, classic science fiction
book.
If you haven't read it, I read it as a kid.
I hope it's still fun now, but I really loved it.
So 2011, Namecoin was launched.
Namecoin basically did exactly that,
putting names on a blockchain.
Here is some interesting trivia details.
The names that it put on a blockchain
were not actually names.
It was just like 250 bytes on a chain,
so you can put a sequence of 01.
Then if it's a name or not, or how you interpret it
as an ASCII or a Unicode or whatever is up to you,
no one verifies everything besides the fact
that the similar bytes was not put before.
No subdomains, because all you put is bytes.
So there is no subdomains.
It's just names that you register on it.
They did have something which is called namespace.
It was in the software layer, not on the blockchain.
I want to put it out, because they had basically
two that they were promoting, the developers.
One was D, which was for domain names for websites.
But the other one was ID.
And that's important, because this already
shows that the thinking was that those names are not
necessarily for domains of computers that
can be used for identify people.
The cost was 0.1 Namecoin.
NMC was a coin, currency of Namecoin.
To adjust it was very difficult.
I mean, you can raise it in a soft work,
but to reduce it, you need to do a hard fork.
Also to know how much it costs really in fiat money,
depends on the moment that you buy it.
And this didn't go to the developers
or to finance anything.
It was just burnt, because in blockchain economy thinking,
burning money is how you make money.
Lecture a few days ago.
This is the last blocks of Namecoin.
One transaction basically just means the miner.
So which means no one did anything there.
As you see at the moment, I think
that it's a project which is still being maintained,
but not really being used.
And there's a question, why did it fail?
Or at least I think it's failed.
Namecoin people here, I apologize.
And I think that there are two things that they did.
Maybe wrong.
First thing, they really copied Bitcoin's playbook one by one.
But name is not money.
Names are not money.
It's a different animal.
You can believe that 100 coins have value
and it's okay, it's not contradicting.
You can go to a store, one store that accepts in dollar,
you will pay in dollar, another store in euros,
you will pay in euros.
Another one wants Bitcoin, okay,
you will get some Bitcoin.
It's not contradicting,
but no one wants to think
that the same object have two names.
This is not how it goes.
Like historically, if I would think
that some God has one name,
and you will think that the same God has another name,
there's a good chance we will go to a war.
We will not accept each other's belief.
But the other reason, which is maybe more deep,
is that namecoin developers
had a huge challenge of building it.
It was the second blockchain.
It was the first NFT blockchain.
It was the first side chain
that had to invent marriage mining.
And also after it was launched,
it was definitely not scalable,
and also don't think very scalable right now.
And they spent lots of their time
improving the protocol
and handling all those technical details.
And they didn't have time to also think,
how do I make it useful?
What is it good for?
And you know, pushing it to users.
So 2016, as I said, I entered the blockchain ecosystem.
I asked people about namecoin.
I even bought one, I think, just a name,
but I'm not 100% sure what this intended to.
The general feeling was that all the good names are squatted.
There is nothing to do with it.
And the names on a blockchain is nice for playing,
but not really a useful use case.
And in the same year, E&S was announced.
E&S is a very different animal from namecoin
because it is built on top of Ethereum.
And if you don't know anything about blockchain,
you should know that to write an application
on top of Ethereum is much easier
than building a blockchain.
Which means E&S, which is really well written
and a nice engineering feat,
is still easier to write back from namecoin.
So they actually had time to have long discussions
how to get people to use it.
And they did two things.
One of them, they said, okay,
names are going to have an auction.
So it won't be the fastest person who takes a name,
but the one who agrees to pay the most.
It's not necessarily the best solution,
but at least, you know, they try something.
But the other thing that, again, I see is very crucial
is that they had updates.
They could update their system relatively easily
and they were very open about it
because when they launched in May the 4th,
May 2017, they called it E&S Temporary Registrar.
And some of the messages, they even said,
you know, we are not sure how to do it right.
So that's why temporary at some point,
it will be changed, be prepared for it.
At the time, 2017 May, it was before the DAO hack.
So it was not really common in blockchain
to say that you are going to change things.
This was still the time of, you know,
immutable programs and code is low and stuff.
How did it go?
Well, it went in the same way like Namecoin,
quite successful commercially in the beginning.
I think that someone put a bid on the name exchange.eth
of $2.6 million.
So that's quite well.
Like Namecoin, the money did not go to the pockets
of the developers, but instead it was locked.
So it was a deposit and the moment that the name expired,
you got it back, which if you want to fight squatters
or, you know, speculators, it's not necessarily
the best idea because they have nothing to lose.
A year passed and another blockchain name system
was announced, Handshake.
And I like to say that Handshake took one step backwards,
three steps forward.
I think it's kind of represented.
And the step backward was that ENS was built
on top of a blockchain, which could be very flexible.
Namecoin, sorry, Handshake said, well,
we are actually going to build our own blockchain.
It was a very, already in 2018, to have your own proof
of work blockchain without updates was outdated.
And I said, because I remember hearing about it,
and I thought, OK, that's two years, at least too late.
But this thing provided them the ability to do something
that the other name systems didn't do.
And I don't think that anyone else does,
besides them at the moment, because I said that decentralized
is registering a name and verifying a name by yourself.
But actually, to verify something on a blockchain
is very difficult.
In the worst case, you need to have the whole blockchain,
which is huge.
In the better case, you only need to have, like, 30 gigabytes
of a proof.
And that's not very practical for a name system.
And Handshake really made an effort.
The whole white paper is to us to have short proofs.
So of a few kilobytes, that this is the name owner,
and that's what the data that they attached to it.
The other thing that they did is gift economy.
I think I know that this is from Corey Doctorow books,
but at the time, this was very popular among the Bernice.
Handshake actually is the first one that said,
we want to replace ICANN.
We want to be the new root of DNS.
And then people were buying it.
Namecheap bought a Handshake domain for 750K.
There were people who were participating in auctions.
And I checked.
Now people still participate in auctions, not in these amounts,
but it seems to be a thing.
There were some other funny stories
that SiHab joined Handshake and then left two days later,
because they thought they get a domain on the blockchain.
But actually, they got a subdomain on someone
who has a domain on the blockchain.
So there was nothing decentralized about it.
It was a misunderstanding.
But besides those things, I don't
think that there was significant usage of Handshake.
Definitely not at the time.
We'll get back to it towards the end,
just so you know when we speak about what happens nowadays.
But at the time, it was mostly like the other blockchain
systems buying and selling.
So the thing was a bit grim at this point, 2020.
But don't worry.
New decade, things starts to be going to be more happy soon.
We have to go before that one year later,
where ENS permanent registrar was launched.
And they took two years of studying lesson
and actually modified things.
And the first thing that they did is auctions out.
Because for the first few weeks, people
actually participate in auctions for some specific name
like exchange.eth by the time that I wanted to buy ENS domain,
which was Neiman.
No one participate on the auction besides me.
And it was just an annoying process for the user.
So they said auctions are good for the beginning.
Afterwards, you don't need them, which I think
makes lots of sense.
The other thing that they did is that by this point,
they were almost broke.
I mean, they started with a million grants, dollar,
from a few foundation.
I'm not sure if I don't remember if they got anything
else on the way.
But time passes.
You have to pay people's salary.
They were almost broke.
And then they thought, I mean, their idea
was to be a non-profit that gets stuff from donations and grants.
But 2019, the blockchain had a winter.
No one gave them any money.
And then they figured out, well, there is all this locked money.
And why do we actually lock it?
It's not good for anything.
It's not protecting against squatters
because they can try to squat on them.
If they don't manage, they just get the money back.
And they did.
The next step, money goes to ENS organization
with this NGO, which means it's supposed to be
fed into the development.
And overnight, they became from an organization
which is almost broke, the organization that
has millions of dollars.
This was important.
I was already developing for ENS before.
But it was a side project.
And when this happened, you start to think, as a developer,
well, maybe I should take it more seriously
because now they have money that they have to give someone.
They are an NGO.
They are supposed by their declaration legally
to give it to the ecosystem.
They didn't give to anyone.
But they thought, it sits here.
Another thing that they did is that they kind of changed
or defined what their names are for.
And they said, this is a web-free identity,
or more specifically, because a web-free is a marketing term
very annoying.
It's an identity supposed to be used in a pharium ecosystem.
And I think that they managed actually
to do it quite well.
Verdeirector, Brantley Milligan, he did, in my opinion, magic.
He has infinite amount of energy.
I wrote some message in ENS forum.
And immediately he said, hey, let's set a talk and meet.
And he asked, do I want to build for them more?
He had ideas.
He started to do all those things where
he asked people in Twitter to change their name
to their ENS names to show that people actually
use it as identity.
In conferences, people start to use it.
In the firm conferences is their identity, their name,
Naiman.eth.
He was really pushing it well.
And I got to see it all from front seat,
because at the time I was working on this project.
It was a search engine for the Centra's Web for ENS plus
IPFS websites.
So I got to see how every month more and more people
got ENS name.
There was more buzz.
And people actually use it as an ID.
I'm not saying it was a huge thing, but it was a thing.
There was a use case for this thing.
And before, there was none.
But still, when people ask me, hey,
are you going to do something professional with it?
Are you going to build a serious big project or business
on top of it, I was saying that I'm not
sure, because the root of ENS at the time
was held by a multi-seq of, I think, seven people, which
is quite risky.
Forget the centralization.
Not the centralization.
It's just quite risky.
If I'm doing a project which I put a lot of effort and investment
on top of ENS and then something is
hacked with a multi-seq of seven people, which
is very easy to imagine, then what do I do next?
So I was telling everyone.
I also told it to the ENS people.
I'm not sure it's so directly or implied it.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who mentioned that.
And then we reached November 2021,
when a very significant thing happened.
ENS DAO was announced.
DAO is a decentralized organization.
If you're not from the blockchain ecosystem,
it's OK if you don't know it.
The idea of a DAO is that instead of out
of the crypto Twitter, I mean, my mom's neighbor who
has nothing to do with blockchain
told me that he bought an ENS thing.
And I was like, oh, I'm working with it.
That's nice.
I think that lots of people who are now active in ENS
joined at this stage, not because there is money,
just because they heard about it.
It's made an impact.
It's a big project that gave control to the community.
It's also a bit if you want to work on blockchain,
but you don't want to get into all the protocols.
And you're not interested in money.
Name system is something which is a bit easier to understand
and clearer.
ENS DAO is very active nowadays.
So I was a member of ENS DAO for the first year.
I was managing a subgroup of decentralized peer-to-peer
websites, which is what I did at the time.
I don't do it anymore.
But I still follow it a bit.
I know lots of people there.
It's super active.
The forum is active.
There are calls every day.
There are votings.
I mean, for the good or for the bad,
very really an active community.
And at some point, I don't remember right now exactly when
they actually transferred the root key ownership to the ENS
DAO, which means now it's owned by ENS.
There is one problem, or maybe two.
And the first one is that ENS voting goes with ENS token.
You can buy the token, which basically
means that someone who is rich enough or motivated enough
can kind of take over the organization.
And if you want it to be critical infrastructure
of the internet, it's very risky.
If at some point it will be, then someone will take over.
I mean, if someone can, then they will.
I mean, the DAO can at some point decide that you get voting
by reputation.
But at the moment, this is the situation.
And the other thing, while handshake have short proofs,
ENS does not have such thing to verify anything
on the Ethereum blockchain.
You need quite a long proof.
It's not very practical for anyone
to do unless it's really your passion, like me.
But even then, it's super difficult.
I don't know what's the technical way to solve it.
If any, right now, everyone compromise on that,
and they actually verify things with other services.
2023, which for me is today, because we
are beginning of 2024.
So the state is at the moment that once ENS DAO went on,
they have a huge market cap.
They were very, even during the crypto winter of blockchain,
they had quite a buzz.
People started to make clubs like the 10K Club of People
owned the name 1.ETH till 9,999.ETH.
There was a website for clubs and stuff like that.
It made an impact, and as a result,
any blockchain now has their own name system,
because it's just easy to make.
And they see that there is people who will pay for it.
I know people that in each of those block systems
buy a few names, because normally they are quite cheap,
and they are like, well, we don't know
which is a good investment.
But articles like the top 10, blockchain domain name systems,
I admit that for a while I was trying to follow that,
but I didn't find any that has technical innovation, which
is what I care about.
And I reached the point of saying,
well, if something will happen, which is technically
innovative, someone will tell me.
ENS itself at the moment is focusing on a few things.
One of them is subdomains.
They want the subdomains to be kind of like domain,
so you make someone a subdomain, and then they own it.
Like it's not dependent on who owns the name.
It's completely independent.
If they had something which is called name wrapper,
it was developed for many years and launched last year.
CCIP is basically cross-chain interoperability,
which means how to communicate with,
from ENS can communicate with other blockchain.
I am not a huge fan of that.
I think it's centralized, a decentralized technology,
but they seem to, lots of people, they like it.
And they really want to join ICANN.
Like they really want to get control of the .eth subdomain,
a TLD, sorry, but the problem is the .eth is there
for Ethiopia.
Nick Johnson, the owner of eth, had a long thread about it
recently, like a month or two ago.
So if you want to read the details and where they held up
to this discussion with ICANN of getting it or not,
you can see it there.
For the other projects, Handshake,
I went and checked just before the lecture what's
going on there, and I got the feeling that's not much change
from the lunch, only that it's less enthusiasm now.
Like people still participate in auctions with less money.
I didn't find any real use case besides that.
If anyone knows and I missed it, let me know.
Another story that happened, and I'm going to wrap it up,
is a stop-all domain.
It's another ENS, another a few blocks name system.
They try to patent some names, and now
they're a legal battle with ENS.
And I thought of maybe speaking of what I think happens
in the future, but time is up, so I will not.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.