Introduction to Hash Name Service: A Hashgraph-based registry
One of the biggest challenges we face in order to achieve mainstream adoption of crypto is ease of use. All we have to work with is a random segment of letters and numbers we have to copy/paste every time we want to make a transfer. Using this sequence of numbers is not only inconvenient, but it could also engender problems around mistaken identities. What Hedera Hashgraph needs is a more user-friendly way to identify people and objects on the network. At Hashing Systems, we have conceived HNS, which stands for Hash Name Service in order to address this problem. HNS is much like DNS; it is a Hashgraph-based dapp built on smart contracts to give human readable names.
What is DNS?
Do you remember the last time you typed the IP address of a website you were trying to reach? Me neither. Luckily, websites have names such as amazon.com, facebook.com, and medium.com/hashingsystems. These names exist because of DNS. DNS, or Domain Name service, convert IP Addresses to human-readable names. This allows for users to reach websites more easily. Without DNS, our interactions with the internet would look much different, much more inconvenient and slow.
How does DNS work?
What DNS does is act as a directory, storing IP addresses and their human-readable names. DNS then translates those into IP addresses to search for websites. It is like a phone book. The phone numbers are the IP addresses that one needs to call someone, and the names of the people are like facebook.com.
What is HNS
While DNS assigns human-readable names to IP addresses, HNS assigns them to the long alphanumeric strings that identify records on Hashgraph. This ability to identify records allows HNS to facilitate transactions, smart contract interactions, and file queries.
In the case of transactions, for example, complicated strings of letters and numbers for each party whom a user needs to transact with are difficult to keep track of. There is no way to discern one string from another other. When taking into account the volume of transactions that are supposed to take place on Hashgraph, there is bound to be transactions sent to wrong parties.
Why Hashgraph?
Hashgraph is a high-speed network, with a tested capacity of over 100,000 transactions per second (TPS). This is a far greater capacity than any blockchain network. Hashgraph also has very cheap queries, which will increase the actual transactions per second.
Unlike Ethereum, smart contracts on Hedera must pay maintenance fees in order to remain on the network. This creates pressure on the contracts to constantly generate value somehow. Developers won’t deploy as many unnecessary contracts which have running costs. They’ll instead choose to pay fees to get the functionality they need. We foresee a wave of dapps that take advantage of this, spreading the cost of storing the contracts among hundreds or thousands of users.
How does HNS work?
What we envision for HNS is a registry of domains assigned to hashes, the strings of letters and numbers that identify an item on Hashgraph. These domains are much like what we know URLs to be today: human-readable names such as facebook.com. Assigning these domains to hashes will provide recognizable identities to records on Hashgraph and would be done through the smart contract layer. These domains will then be used to search for hashes and the records they represent through the “resolver.” What this mechanism will do is to connect queries using domains to their corresponding item (user’s wallets, etc.) through claims. As a result, when a user wants to, for example, send HBar to another user, they will simply need to query for the other user’s domain on HNS in order to find the other user. Identifying records on Hashgraph will be as simple as typing google.com.
Why HNS?
HNS offers a more secure way to interact with decentralized applications than DNS. This is true for two reasons. First, there is a validation process in the Hashgraph that confirms amounts and identities on the network. This means that transactions, as well as the identity of users, can be validated by other users. Second, the proof-of-stake model in hashes prevents ill-intentioned parties from impersonating other users. Each item has a unique hash which prevents it from being mistaken for another item, or from it being copied. Additionally, HNS is as fast as DNS, which is key to its mainstream adoption.
HNS will facilitate users accessing this technology. Consequently, transactions, smart contracts, and file queries will increase with the ease-of-use. You can reserve your HNS domain now at https://hns.domains/!
