Thanks for this, really helpful. My purpose in doing this is to figure out what the most practical/quickest to deployment solution is for distributed DNS records, so this is definitely useful. I looked at both namecoin and CJDNS. Looks like namecoin has attracted most of the developers from the initial project, with CJDNS still limping along (I'm guessing based on activity here.) Links to the code: namecoin: https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/graphs/impact CJDNS: https://github.com/vinced/namecoin/graphs/impact Could you speak to the structure of namecoin a bit more? Looks like it uses the "proof-of-work" trick from bitcoin to validate DNS records (and arbitrary key-value pairs), unless my skimming was totally off. That's pretty ingenious, for those who are interested I found a great blog post that serves both as an introduction to Bitcoin and explains how it could be used to make a distributed DNS. http://paulbohm.com/2011/06/17/bitcoins-value-is-decentralization It appears they're also proposing integrating with providers like OpenNIC, OpenDNS, etc. although I'm not qualified to judge how feasible that is. http://dot-bit.org/Project_Roadmap They also share computing resources with current bitcoin generators.... seems they've thought of everything. Someone mentioned DNSSEC in a new off-shoot thread. DNSSEC within the existing DNS paradigm is only a half-measure (although I think you'll agree, an important one.) *Notes on other dDNS providers:* So besides namecoin and CJDNS, there's also Dot-P2p, the dDNS system that was proposed based on the BitTorrent protocol. Some info was here: http://p2pfoundation.net/Dot-P2P but the link to http://dot-p2p.org/index.php?title=Main_Page looks dead. The first hit Googling "distributed dns" brings up another codebase that hasn't been modified seemingly since 2005 ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/distributeddns/files). I checked out DIANNA as well, but didn't see a link to active code so assumed it was mostly dead. http://dianna-project.org/wiki/Main_Page On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 4:36 PM, <liberationtech@lewman.us> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 02:19:47PM -0700, rohandixit86@gmail.com wrote 14K bytes in 317 lines about: : Curious if anyone had thoughts on OpenNIC as a provider of decentralized : DNS. From my naive point of view, it often seems like dDNS is a good way to : stop lazy types of censorship. But perhaps I'm missing something and the : problem is more complicated than that?

It is not distributed. It is just a rebirth of the non-ICANN root servers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlterNIC for past history on this idea.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root for more history and current status.

-- Andrew http://tpo.is/contact pgp 0x6B4D6475

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