Taking Back The Internet with Naomi Brockwell and Brad Kam
Naomi: I’m here at San Francisco Blockchain Week with Brad Kam. He is the co-founder of Unstoppable Domains. Thanks so much for chatting with me.
Brad: Thanks so much for having me.
Naomi: Currently there are big issues with the internet. It’s more or less centralized in that you have to get approval from certain agencies in order to set up websites and to get domain names. Now, this is something that Unstoppable Domains want to decentralize and effectively solve.
Brad: Yes, absolutely. Blockchain domains are controlled by you. It’s a self-custody system, which is extremely different than the way the traditional internet works.
Naomi: Let’s take a step back and just talk about domains in general. Why blockchain is necessary in this, how blockchain is different from DNS, for example?
Brad: A lot of people don’t know this about the traditional domain name industry but there are registry companies. The biggest one is called Verisign, which owns .com. And then there are these registrars which are approved and they’re the ones that get to hold domains for you. They’re your custodian and they’re the ones that get to move them around and then there’s a centralized server run by an international nonprofit organization called ICANN. These are systems that have developed in sort of a non-profit, open, community type way over the past couple of decades to organize the internet.
Naomi: You’re talking about the entire internet infrastructure in terms of domains being this, having to pass-through this one centralized place.
Brad: This is the problem and these are the situations where blockchain makes the most sense. With a traditional domain — yes, you own it — but GoDaddy, Google Domains or whomever stores it for you, they can move it around or take it away from you and this happens frequently. A blockchain domain is an NFT, it’s like a Crypto Kitty or something like that. It’s an ERC721 token. It is an asset on the blockchain. It sits inside of your wallet. You control it. No one can move it around other than you. You need the private key in order to transfer it. You need the private key in order to associate websites with it. So, this means that you have websites that only you can put up and only you can take down, which is very different than the current internet. None of the systems that work for the traditional DNS system apply here. There are actually two approval systems in the traditional world. There’s the approval to get the domain extension, which is like .com or .io or something like that. There’s a process and you have to go through like applying with ICANN and bid and get approved to get these domain name extensions and then you also have the registrars like GoDaddy, they also need to get approved. None of those dynamics apply with blockchain domain systems.
Naomi: Blockchain came into the space and was able to decentralize trust and obviously, that can be applied to lots of different areas and not just currency that can be applied to organizations. In this case, it’s applied to domain names. So, is there any sort of conflict in terms of jurisdiction? If someone sets up a domain on blockchain and then another company wants to offer that exact same domain, is that even possible?
Brad: It could be. I think the best way to address that is to just launch a domain name system that doesn’t currently exist, and I think that’s just being an ethical business in general. You should go and seek your own intellectual property. So, we’re launching .crypto, .crypto does not exist in the traditional domain name system. It does not exist anywhere else so far as we’re aware and it’s meant to be a domain name system for the entire crypto community to receive money and to build websites.
Naomi: And so if another company like GoDaddy says, well we want to launch .crypto then there’s going to be a jurisdictional battle over who has the rights to that and you guys being already set up, I presume that you will be able to claim some sort of precedence there.
Brad: Well it will also be, that we’ll be in applications. So, applications, you know, if you can go and view these websites inside of browsers why would those same browsers want to support some new system that may or may not come into existence in the next two, three, five years.
Naomi: Talk to me about this, payment gateway that .crypto and .zill will allow.
Brad: I could have Brad.crypto. I could attach my Bitcoin address, my Ethereum address, my Litecoin address, my privacy coin addresses all to this one domain. I tell it to you, you go into a wallet, you type in Brad.Crypto and you pay me. You don’t need to know what my addresses are anymore. We don’t need to talk about what the addresses are. I don’t need to copy and paste and email them to you — none of that. I don’t even need to know which currency you want to receive because you’ve already auto configured your domain with the five or seven or ten that you want to accept. The user is writing information to the blockchain and signing a message with their private key. So, they’re saying, my Bitcoin address equals this. They control the private key of that domain, so, they’re the only ones that could add a Bitcoin address to it. And that’s it, when the wallet sees the domain, the wallet just reads the blockchain, finds the appropriate address and drops it in. It’s almost identical to what happened with IP addresses and in traditional domain names. You know, this was the reason why the consumer internet started taking off, because I didn’t have to tell you: “Hey, check out this cool website at 43.597.829”. That would’ve been pretty hard to say over the phone or even in a text message and those are shorter. You know a cryptocurrency public address if it’s an Ethereum address it’s 40 characters.
Naomi: Will every wallet be able to just type in brad.crypto? Is it going to take a certain amount of wallet to be able to send to these addresses?
Brad: So, each wallet will need to support blockchain domains. It’s very simple to read the blockchain for this type of information and most of all, it’s already reading the blockchain for various other types of information because you can attach any cryptocurrency address to this one domain. It means that you essentially have interoperability. Any wallet, regardless of what currencies it supports, can use the same system.
Naomi: Let’s say for example, that I only can figure my address, naomi.crypto to accept Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash and let’s say that someone tried to send me a Ethereum, is that going to be a lost coin or will it just come up as an error “You can’t send”?
Brad: It will just come off as an error “You can’t send”. Because what the wallet is doing is searching for your Ethereum address. If it doesn’t find one, it just comes back and says, “Sorry”. This “lost coin” concept is going to be more a thing of the past. Right now what happens is we copy and paste addresses and then you know, we get super-duper nervous before we need to send anybody a large amount of money. Or we send them $1 as a test transaction, then call them up afterwards and make sure that they got it and then we send them the real amount. All of that stuff is going to be a thing of the past because I’m going to see the domain name. I’m going to know that the input was correct. That’s a stable input that was, you know, made months ago by that person. So, I’m just not going to need to panic anymore.
Naomi: I love the name Unstoppable Domains because it really does get to the ethos of all of this, about taking back control of the Internet and I’ve always hated that centralized process where you literally have to get approval. You know, there are some domain endings that you have to be licensed in those countries. If you’re not licensed in the countries, you need to get a proxy. You know, all of that stuff. It just seems so archaic, like it shouldn’t exist in the world of the Internet, which doesn’t have borders. So, I love that we have a new system that you guys are testing out. Now, is this fully functional at the moment?
Brad: Yes. So, you can go and use domain names for payments. You can use them in several wallets. The part that is functional but not ubiquitous yet, I would say is the decentralized website piece. The way this works is I have my domain name. I attach my content, which is stored on a decentralized storage network like IPFS or any of the other ones. And now you can go into a browser that supports blockchain domains, type in a website, and I can see your content. That is a website that only you can put up and only you can take down. Because right now on the current Internet, it’s not just the domain name side where GoDaddy can take your domain away, there’s also the content side around the world. There’s a lot of different players in the cloud space.
Those parties can take down your website too and they do, and it happens not just because of people breaking the law but sometimes because of people putting up things that are very unpopular and a distributed storage community would solve this problem. You know, where you have your content stored on hundreds or thousands of different people’s servers and then essentially, it’s impossible to turn you off.
This is foundational for the internet and I think this is what a lot of people that were building the internet back in the 90s thought they were making. You know, this was kind of like the way it was supposed to go basically but instead what happened is, is that we wound up with a handful of centralized parties and companies that essentially control the traffic of the entire internet and can turn us off and they do and if we were to switch around that dynamic, we would be able to enable global free speech anywhere. You know, anybody protesting around the world whose websites are getting taken down they can use this, they can distribute the content and it’s going to be all open source tools. It’s going to be really hard. I mean, if a website gets even a little bit popular, you know, it goes a little bit viral, it’s going to be on so many different computers, you won’t be able to switch it off.
Naomi: The more that we can support the businesses that are trying to decentralize the infrastructure of the world, I think the better off that we will all be. So, thank you so much for all the work that you’re doing and I’m looking forward to testing out Unstoppable Domains.
Brad: Thank you so much and thanks for your enthusiasm and yeah, we’ll get you a .crypto domain.
Naomi: Let’s do it.
