Transaction

j"1LAnZuoQdcKCkpDBKQMCgziGMoPC4VQUckM¹<div class="post">OK, here goes. My design for DomainChain builds on many of the ideas expressed here already. My main contribution is to remove "generation" from the design. It turns out that relying only on transaction fees makes everything very much simpler, and makes it easy to piggyback DomainChain onto Bitcoin.<br/><br/>Here's a quick summary:<br/><br/><ul style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0;"><li>Bitcoin already allows for a text "payload" to be included with a transaction. Any bitcoin transaction that is sent with the right payload becomes a domain name registration.</li><li>To register a domain name, just send any amount of bitcoin to yourself, with a special payload. This payload identifies itself as a DomainChain payload, and contains the desired domain name plus the IP address of the authoritative name server(s). If no-one else already has that name registered, it's yours.</li><li>To transfer a domain name to someone else, just send them the associated bitcoin (actually any part of the associated transaction will do). The GUI will let you do this in terms of "domain names" rather than in terms of "coins".</li><li>To change the authoritative name server(s), just send the associated bitcoin to yourself with a payload that identifies the new authoritative name server(s)</li><li>Registrations last forever unless you terminate them by sending that bitcoin to yourself with a payload that is a DomainChain "cancel" message</li><li>You can register a domain name with the smallest convenient amount of bitcoins (currently 0.01 BTC), so the system imposes no scarcity of domain names. However, miners will impose transaction fees which increase as the block size increases. This provides a disincentive to registration spammers</li><li>To resolve (lookup) a domain name, the block chain is scanned for the most recent valid transaction for that domain name. In principle, anyone can run a DomainChain resolver, but in practice most users will use a DNS service that is DomainChain-aware</li></ul><br/>Advantages:<br/><br/><ul style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0;"><li>Provides domain name registration with the same level of pseudonymity as Bitcoin</li><li>Holds registration data in a tamper-resistant distributed manner</li><li>Strengthens Bitcoin by providing additional economic incentive for generators (because they will be able to charge transaction fees for domain name transactions)</li><li>Can be implemented much more quickly than any other scheme that has been proposed so far</li><li>Existing bitcoin clients <del>are unaffected. If they receive coins that are associated with a domain name registration they will see them as coins.</del> do not display domain name registration transactions. No modification is needed.</li></ul><br/>Disadvantages:<br/><br/>(I'm sure you'll let me know of the disadvantages.)<br/><br/>Implementation:<br/><br/>1. Patch the standard bitcoin client. Run it on the bitcoin test network. The patched client will have a separate panel for domain names that are associated with bitcoins. These bitcoins will not show on the standard panel, nor will they be included in the total balance available to spend. On the DomainChain panel, instead of a "send coin" button there will be buttons for "register a new name", "change nameservers", "transfer a name" and "abandon a name". There will also be a scrolling list of domain names together with their nameservers.<br/><br/>2. Write a program that scans the block chain to determine the authoritative domain name servers for a given domain name. Patch a standard open source domain name server to consult the output of this program as part of its name resolution.<br/><br/>3. If it works well, persuade Satoshi to allow these transactions in the main network. Of course, it would be technically possible to run it on a new network with a new block chain, but who wants competing currencies?<br/><br/>There's obviously a lot to be fleshed out, but I think the design is workable and easy to implement.</div> text/html