nostr:npub1elwpzsul8d9k4tgxqdjuzxp0wa94ysr4zu9xeudrcxe2h3sazqkq5mehan i would love your insights here if you had amin
Discussion
You're both right from where I'm looking.
I've been saying that DNS is the perfect mechanism to assert NIP-05 identifiers (and Lud-16 lnurls, and even BTC addresses) for quite some time.
In the case of NIP-05/LUD-16 The .well-known/URI scheme is limiting - and I would also argue, less secure than, say, a DNSSEC signed zone.
While true that DNS is "centralized" ultimately at the root level, there is no content or participant level censorship there - the DNS tree is somewhat like a federated namespace AND there will in time be more decentralized namespaces outside of the IANA tree within which one could pin their NIP-05 or LUD-16 ids.
None of these arguments have convinced the people it needs to (*cough* nostr:npub180cvv07tjdrrgpa0j7j7tmnyl2yr6yr7l8j4s3evf6u64th6gkwsyjh6w6 *cough*) - and to his counter-points, I do somewhat get it).
It is possible that somebody, someday could propose another NIP entirely for the assertion of NIP-05-like id's (they would look exactly the same) via DNS TXT recs.
It is not obvious or probable that such a NIP proposal would succeed.
At the risk of sounding repetitive, I'll refer to my previous article on this sort of thing here (and there are a few threads on Github somewhere):
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/simplifying-bitcoin-addresses-dns
Any other non IANI namespace would have to be implemented/recognized by the client or by the upstream dns resolvers of that client, correct?
Why do you say there is no censorship? Government confiscates domains all the time.
There is also some "soft" censorship in the sense that the TLD administrators (apparently) can decide to increase the domain prices by a lot and then you have to either pay or lose your domain.
Again - Well-known URIs in nip-05 and lud-16 are just as exposed to this as publishing it via DNS TEXT
So then the well known URI faces the exact same risk since that's under a domain name anyway.
I'm just saying to signal the hexkey via DNS TXT, not via a flat file confined to the domain component of a NIP-05.
You don't gain any advantages to doing it via well-known URI in censorship terms and you lose flexibility and usability in terms of deployment.
For some people it is easier to manage that by having a file on their website, for others it is easier to do that through DNS records, there are no obvious best choices here.
However, for a hosted service like nostrplebs.com or zbd.gg to have a username for each user, it is vastly easier to do it through the well-known URL.
It is also much easier and familiar for client developers to make HTTP calls than to do DNS calls.
That still makes Nostrplebs a third party that has control over your identity
What if you get your nostrplebs NIP-05 id tattooed on your face and then they go out of business?
You should never tattoo that. You should never treat your NIP-05 as your primary identity. It is just a temporary pointer.
I think that’s the main place where we disagree. Because if Nostr is going to succeed big, there will need to be a a human readable abstraction for npubs
My biggest issue is that I am now a nostr pleb, love calling myself that. I could figure out how to implement my own Nip 5 id via my domain wedgeorganics but i didn’t know how and for 12k sats I’m all set.
How do I make a permanent electronic identifier without hosting?
npubs are already the readable version of hex pubkeys.
Who buys personal domains? A handful of hipsters with iPhones. The majority of the world's population won't have a domain name anyway.
I would say you’re way off on that. Waaaay off.
If I buy a domain, can I write anything to a TXT record? Can I publish videos there? I base64-encode them, then I split them in chunks and upload to giant set of TXT records.
Technically, you could - but that's not really what anybody is suggesting here.
They're suggesting that instead of telling people "come find me on Nostr at fe6877b5bb095e9d474fe7ffe9b211da985fdf0349ea61a55bb643545bf8bcfa"
You tell them "find me as markjr@bombthrower.com" and being able to do that without plunking a flat file down on https://bombthrower.com/.well-known/nostr.json but by simply publishing the hexval via DNS TXT