19 August 2024
In the Name of Freedom
Neutral money like bitcoin preserves economic liberty. It respects individual freedom. It silently advocates for property rights. Whether you’re an individual or a business, it gives you complete empowerment over your decisions about production, investment, and consumption without the threat of censorship, confiscation, or debasement. Without the involvement of governments, this encourages self-reliance and contributes to social harmony. Bitcoin, in other words, is essential for maintaining a free, prosperous, and just society. The same is true for naming. If anything is as important to society as money, it’s naming. Names are needed for almost everything and individuals & businesses should be able to own their name without it being in the control of a centralized, third party.
Names and money both have historically relied on trust for their efficacy, but just like bitcoin as money ushered in an era of trustlessness, the same must be accomplished for names.
Centralized Naming Providers are Dinosaurs
People have to realize, if they haven’t yet, that they do not own their usernames on social media and are always one click away from having their property, or what should be their property, confiscated.
The security risk of relying on centralized naming systems is especially true for individuals & businesses building in Bitcoin. If you are relying on centralized naming services, it is only a matter of time until you’re compromised, just like we saw with the Squarespace DNS hijacking last month.
Governments often silence political opponents by confiscating their names. Take for instance, PuntCAT, a Catalan private non-profit foundation whose mission is to promote all kinds of activities related to the creation, management, and control of the top-level domain name .cat and, in general, to promote the Catalan language and culture. They were raided by the Spanish police during a tumultuous political time and forced to block several websites critical of the Spanish government due to legal pressure from Madrid. The head of IT was arrested for sedition.
What’s more, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is responsible for managing the global domain name system, has faced numerous controversies over the years related to centralized control, transparency, and accountability. ICANN’s practices and policies are opaque, they have been called out by the likes of Ralph Nader for violating consumer rights, and as the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it, there is evident susceptibility to capture in the excessive deference given to the interests of major trademark and copyright holders.
The point is, if we don’t succeed in decentralizing naming, the risk of censorship, property confiscation, and other rights will always be under attack.
As Bitcoin continues to evolve along with adjacent technology protocols like NOSTR, names will become increasingly important for this reason alone. Names can serve as identifiers for various components within these systems, facilitating communication between different parties and improving the usability, interoperability of protocols, and freedom of speech.
Don’t call it a comeback
Past attempts to decentralize naming have included initiatives like the DNS root server separation in 1997 and new top-level domains (TLDs) like .bit and .name. In the cryptocurrency space, projects such as Namecoin, BitDNS, and blockchain-based name services from companies like Namecoin, Blockstack, and Stacks have also sought to decentralize naming systems. Despite these efforts, many of these initiatives have fallen short due to limited adoption, scalability issues, distribution issues, and other technical complexities, leaving centralized naming systems dominant in both the traditional internet and crypto landscape.
Earlier this year, Matt Corallo proposed a BIP for the coordination of making Bitcoin payments using DNS. Matt is correct to not rely on another blockchain (e.g. ENS on Ethereum), but he acknowledges it is a risk to rely on traditional centralized DNS, and this is only the “best option.” There are organizations in between you and your name, and every website that uses HTTPS to encrypt traffic is relying on a third party to secure it – you are literally not holding your own keys. Not your keys, not your name.
What is needed is a truly decentralized, permissionless naming system built on Bitcoin, free from third party certificate authorities, that empowers users with control and privacy over their online identities. And in contrast to attempts that came before, naming needs to be done in a cypherpunk-centric way without a new blockchain, or modifications to Bitcoin itself, without a new token, foundation, or premine. Users must be entirely in control of how they register, manage, and transfer names.
The Future of Naming is Cypherpunk
The internet, once envisioned as a democratizing force for free expression and global communication, now faces mounting threats from government censorship, corporate influence, and technical vulnerabilities. Decentralized naming, built on the robust and secure foundation of Bitcoin, offers a future where individuals and businesses have greater control over their identities, ideas, and information. By leveraging the immutability, transparency, and censorship-resistant nature of Bitcoin, decentralized naming systems can provide a more resilient and democratic alternative for managing their identities. With Bitcoin as the backbone, we can ensure that decentralized naming is not only inevitable but also truly successful in creating a global, open, and free internet – one where everyone has an equal voice in shaping the global conversation without fear of censorship or control. An internet that is cypherpunk.
This is a guest post by Mike Carson. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.