Reserve pages for companies when Safe Network goes live?

@Seneca has already found a decentralized solution to the squatting problem:

This system reduces incentives to squat a name because you are not sure to keep eternally the lead for a name. Your version of the name will lose its rank when someone pays a higher bid (either the legitimate owner of the associated brand name or another, more greedy, squatter).

As safecoins paid for increasing names rank are recycled, this system helps the network sustainability. I foresee fierce battles to get control of names like google, amazon, facebook, … They will be costly for the contenders, but healthy for the network.

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Then you are back to a single global namespace and a gold rush for squatters to grab them all. This is a step backward from even icann, imo.

no governance in what I proposed. hence, deterministic.

  1. A single global namespace incentivizes squatting. Either for profit or just for fun and bragging rights, or out of vindictiveness, anger, revenge.
  2. Multiple entities exist with the same (legal) name, brand name, nickname, etc. A single global namespace allows one (at most) to use that name.
  3. Many people/organizations will not even hear about Safe Network until early adopters (squatters) have gobbled up all the most interesting names. So latecomers are punished, and may be turned off by this.

doesnt solve squatting. doesn’t solve situation where multiple entities (businesses or people) have the same legal name.

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That’s the challenge I’d like to set to those who want to lock out a number of TLDs. Please first demonstrate, or explain in detail how your imagined fishing attack would catch people - using the UX that Maidsafe have planned

Now this is a capital idea. On the next iteration of testnet, I may try to create such a fishing page! Would be instructive at least :slight_smile:

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I think this belongs in the squatting / DNS topics and is getting in the way of the discussion of the issue raised in the OP. We’ve already done DNS and squatting to death without result so if this is more of that I’ll probably drop out of this discussion.

Yes, that’s because it’s not clear what we(or Maidsafe) want. What are our principles regarding dns?

Should a dns registration be permanent or not?
Do we want current clearnet site owners become the owner of the safe equivalent? Or should it be first come, first served?

other questions?

This should be clear first! Then a solution will come

Wouldn’t International Trademark Laws always prevail, even in the Safe Network? Might be hard to enforce, granted, but still.

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What do you not like about my proposal here?

To me the main problem is that all domains, having a flat fee for registration, are treated as equally valuable when that is not the reality.

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Sorry @danda, I didn’t read/think about it in detail. My interest on this topic is the OP at the moment.

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Fair enough. I think the OP raises a valid concern (squatting) of a single global namespace, but I do not like the OP’s proposal because it doesn’t address the root issue (single global namespace), is centralized, and arbitrary / non-deterministic (meetings? fees?). In short, I don’t seriously consider it for a moment. But I do feel that the concerns raised are valid and can be addressed in way(s) that are more compatible with Safe Network principles.

I’ve put forth one such proposal above, and I’d like to hear some feedback on it, positive or negative. It’s just the first thing that popped into my head and very half-baked, but even still it at least attempts to address the facts that (1) people will arrive to Safe Network over time, and (2) people/orgs in real life have name collisions but still want to have their name addressable.

Perhaps I could be convinced otherwise, but as of now I think that a single global namespace would be a mistake, and we really should be aiming for thousands of reserved TLDs that become available over time as network grows, with at least 10 available at launch, that people can register names under. and no “special” global namespace.

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I like this idea better than my original proposal. Very nice.TLDs are generated over time so .com is no more valuable than .foo, they are arbitrary. no maintenance required, the network does it for you. No lawsuits about entity XYZ stole my company’s trademark, pick a new TLD. If it starts at .aa by the time we get to the .com TLD safe network will be mature enough that the layman should know the difference between it and the clear net, if the clear net exists at all anymore that is. I can’t think of any downsides to this.

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Maybe put it on its own topic. I think the OP deserves scrutiny but the discussion has moved away from this, so we still don’t know if it’s an issue.

No I was not and in fact yours is exactly that because you deterministic release them to allow people to use them. If its not single global then your idea is not even making sense to do it over years.

My reply was in response to your single global idea, but is still good for the initial startup and if people use the original default system then it still helps. The initial reason holds years in while people come over from the old Internet.

There’s a softer non-technical side to this topic, which I think @zettawatt explores really well in the OP. The business / marketing / sales perspective of MaidSafe having something to sell is kinda cool. Opening the company up to building relationships via sales of NRS names is a pretty strong means of introduction. Maybe too strong and it becomes a burden? There’s definitely positives on the non-technical perspective.

But also there are negatives. Already MaidSafe must do a ‘controlled launch’ so they can secure the 15% safecoin needed. That’s not a big deal since it’s been there from very early onand is part of the expectations. But the more stuff they control (or even appear to control) the stronger the perception of it being ‘their’ network or an illegitimate network, and I am not in favor of that.


This will probably be an unpopular opinion and I’m adding it here not because I support it all that strongly but because it’s part of the mix and I feel is worth including.

Why not use something like vanity addresses instead of NRS? Mutable Data addresses are chosen by the uploader so they can simply be chosen to start with the desired characters. The trailing characters can be random or chosen specifically, whatever.

The root motive for this idea is that NRS is a net-negative to include from the start. Initially only xorurls should be available. This may be a little unwieldy but early users will pioneer. Has bitcoin suffered specifically because of the address format and there being no human-meaningful way to send funds? I think no. Has ethereum or namecoin specifically benefitted because of their NRS equivalents? I think no. Happy to be shown otherwise. I think NRS does the opposite of solve a problem, it creates one.

Excluding NRS solves the problem of squatting - there’s nothing to squat, no decision about burn or hold-for-later-sale or any of that.

Excluding NRS also solves the problem that punycode exists to resolve, eg visually similar characters and commonly confused characters, homoglyphs, wikipedia rabbit hole will show how deep this goes; as well as unicode normalization, banned characters such as zero-width-space, just so many issues once we depart from the ascii charset.

Getting off topic, I would rather see improved ergonomics of xorurls by competitive innovation rather than an NRS style system. I have no idea what that looks like but I’m happy to leave out NRS at the start of the network. I think it’s better for users in the long run.

Also slightly off topic and previously discussed in this topic, it’s tempting to treat NRS as an identity verification sort of system, and it is not that. It’s just for convenience. So users potentially accidentally treating it as convenience and verified identitication is to me a poor mix. It’s like accidentally mixing DNS and SSL (which do admittedly have close relations to each other) and NRS is perhaps perpetuating a potentially dubious mixing of concepts. Just potentially, not definitely, maybe a good debate for another topic, convenient identities and/or verified identities.

Overall I don’t really support NRS, I would prefer to see competition and innovation make xorurls more ergonomic (which is what NRS is aiming for but without the competition). I also feel that having NRS links scattered as links through immutable data webpages is potentially a disaster. IMO all links would be better as xorurls.


And lastly, @JimCollinson has once again expressed opinions I agree with. Really impressive insights.

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@mav I would tend to agree that using xorurl only could be a decent way to start. as you say, nothing to squat. back to basics.

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I haven´t read all the thread but you guys forget all this comes down to marketing campaigns? You are talking about multibillion dollar companies who reach millions of people everyday! It is just a matter of putting up a link to their new safenetwork page! They can change it from “Google dot com” to Google dot safe… they can come up with a million alternatives instead of paying someone who already has registered their domain name! Here in Brazil Globo.com - the biggest tv network in the country… went from it to Globo.tv, when the internet was just beginning… I think they set up a site in Turvalu…then they didn´t have to pay anybody for the .com domain. Simple solution! Today they have their .com , I don´t know what agreement they came to…

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11 posts were split to a new topic: NRS Brainstorming Megathread

It wasn’t supposed to. We were talking about stopping people from getting scammed by scammers on .com and .org type sites with regard to oldnet companies. The thread is off topic now. NRS and squatting is a larger discussion best held elsewhere.

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