From: p2p-hackers@zgp.org (p2p-hackers@zgp.org)
Date: Mon Jul 1 10:27:02 2002
Subject: [p2p-hackers] Distributed Domain Name System

Hal,  

Sorry for the response to the old posting below re: distributing names
amongst the world's population. 

There was a similar approach to the distribution of property of publically
owned companies in the old soviet bloc countries.  Everyone in the population
was given an equal amount of shares for free, and they let the market fight
out the value. 

In practice, a few wise old hounds sneaked the shares out of the hands of
most shareholders for the price of a potato,  (in which people saw more
immediate value). They then went on to become multi-millionaires as majority
shareholders.

Cefn
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Hal Finney [mailto:hal@finney.org] 
Sent: 25 June 2002 07:53
To: p2p-hackers@zgp.org
Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] Distributed Domain Name System


Brad Neuberg writes:

> Taking names is on a first come, first served basis.  If you get it 
> first, you have it.

At first I was concerned that this would produce a "gold rush" mentality
like we saw in the early days of the .com era and make people build huge 
name-reservation farms to grab names as fast as possible.  Thousands of
names a second, millions of names a day, every possible word, every
possible combination of letters, all snapped up by speculators.

But then I thought again, and I realized that this is actually a good
thing. 

According to Coase's Theorem, if you have an efficient market in property
titles  (and the net is great at that kind of thing) and everything
is clearly owned by some person, you have a very efficient system.
It doesn't matter how the initial allocation is done, the property will
end up in the hands of the people who can put it to the best use.

So really the problem in a system like the DNS is how to make the names
available as efficiently as possible.   A system like this where they
are made available very quickly and cheaply is a good choice.

Another possibility is somehow to distribute all of the names among
every person in the world.   If you wanted a certain name you could look
up in a registry (or run an algorithm) and figure out which one person
in the entire world owned it.  Then you would try and buy it from them.
One way to do this would be to number every person in the world, and
use a hash function from names to numbers for the initial assignment.

This is not that practical because most people aren't on the net,
and even if they were, it doesn't seem possible to number each person. 
Then there are all those births and deaths, although this can be handled
in principle like any other form of property title.

So failing a system like this, just getting the names into people's
hands any old way is not a bad approach.   Make it as cheap as possible
so that no labor is lost in getting the names out there, and the market
will solve the rest of the problem...

Hal Finney 
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