Proposal: Domains should be regularly auctioned

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fresheneesz
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Re: Proposal: Domains should be regularly auctioned

Post by fresheneesz »

Hoarders = "their intention is presumably to become sellers"
Regular buyers = their intention is to become users of the domains they buy, explicitly not sellers

More buying = more liquidity

More selling does not mean more liquidity. Liquidity is explicitly only about making selling easier. Those who put up domains for sale are doing absolutely nothing to increase liquidity. Also, why do you think domain liquidity is a good thing? Beyond a certain point, more liquidity offers people essentially nothing. If you can sell a domain within a year, why the need for it to be faster? Unless you'll go bankrupt without the sale of your domain in the next week, liquidity is really a worthless goal in the realm of domains.
"any evidence to support that claim"
Even a single domain being held without being used is evidence. You can find literally hundreds of thousands of examples to add to your overflowing barrel of evidence. The exploits of Kevin Hamm and his like are very well documented. It seems we disagree on whether there is evidence it is a problem, because we don't agree on what the problem is. So I ask you: is there any other value besides liquidity (which I've shown above isn't provided by hoarders) that domain squatters bring to the market? If not, they should be squashed if at all possible (without causing other problems in the system).
How would you determine if they are "using it" anyway?
The basic criteria for a domain being "used" is that the value the buyer expects to get from the domain be based on something other than proceeds from resale. Is that an explicit enough definition?
"only using email or something else on that domain ... What if I'm holding the domain for a child of mine to use in a few years? What about companies who commonly use defensive registrations to protect their brands and IP from confusingly similar names? What about companies that register names well in advance of yet-to-be-released products so it'll still be available when their product dev is ready? "
I consider all these cases to be using the domain rather than "domain squatting", because the value they intend to get from the domain is not from resale.
What gives you the right to say that I'm not using a domain name just because you don't know all of the facts?
I'm in no way arguing that some kind of central OR distributed authority should be able take away your domain because they believe you aren't "using it". What I am saying is that the most common ways domain squatting is done today A. provides negative value to the marketplace, and B. can be mitigated pretty easily without harming all the "edge cases" you were mentioning and without anyone having to decide whether someone is "using it" or not.
I totally understand the passion
: )

virtual_master
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Re: Proposal: Domains should be regularly auctioned

Post by virtual_master »

fresheneesz wrote:virtual_master - mind linking the old threads you mentioned, if you can find them?
I have searched all relevant topics with search 'auction' and here are the relevant topics:
ht[url]tps://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=989[/url]
https://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1016
https://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1287
https://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1439
https://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1502
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mightbemike
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Re: Proposal: Domains should be regularly auctioned

Post by mightbemike »

fresheneesz wrote:The basic criteria for a domain being "used" is that the value the buyer expects to get from the domain be based on something other than proceeds from resale. Is that an explicit enough definition?
No. You can't know what they are planning, or what they expect. You just assumed, based on no evidence, that they were sitting on the domain you wanted with no intention of ever using it.
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indolering
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Re: Proposal: Domains should be regularly auctioned

Post by indolering »

I found this through a comment on my blog and I haven't read the entire thread because of it's size but I will try to address a few of your points.

First and foremost: do not confuse squatters with legitimate users. We want to encourage the latter as much as possible because they bring value to the naming system as a whole!

Squatting is a solved problem
The reason that the price is low right now is that 99.9999% of web users cannot visit .bit websites. Once we get solid .bit DNS resolvers, lightweight clients, and stabilize Javascript DNS (speech.is) we can flip the switch and raise renewal fees on domains. Boom, 99% of squatters will be eradicated.

Upping the price now only makes it more expensive for early adopters to get involved. As developers, we have to buy a domain every time we update the client. Jacking up the price would only hurt those of us honestly holding onto domains for others, I've got zooko.bit and I have every intention of giving it to him once he gets around to downloading the client.

Finally, I think the squatters are going to have a hard time finding buyers for their domains.
There more TLD's available than ever before and anyone using a domain for a phishing operation (gmail.bit) will get added to the phishtank. Hell, since we have a phishing URL database, why not have a squatter database? That would drop the value of their domains like a stone.

Auctions can be used for evil
An auction system for individual domains can be used to punish individual name holders unfairly. You think Microsoft or Yahoo wouldn't have pushed the price of Google.com up when it was a small company? You really think people wouldn't spend money on Wikileaks.bit? Given the potential for shenanigans, why wouldn't people just choose a regular ICANN domain? Yeah, they may have to do some jurisdiction hopping, but at least they wouldn't have to fork our a few grand every year just to renew their domain.

We need a floating price point, one that can be loosely tied to a fiat currency and we have a pretty good idea of how to do it. We still need to do some research and run some models to figure it out, but at this point it's an engineering challenge not some fundamental design flaw.
DNS is much more than a key->value datastore.

domob
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Re: Proposal: Domains should be regularly auctioned

Post by domob »

indolering wrote:We need a floating price point, one that can be loosely tied to a fiat currency and we have a pretty good idea of how to do it. We still need to do some research and run some models to figure it out, but at this point it's an engineering challenge not some fundamental design flaw.
Note that the "we have a pretty good idea of how to do it" here means that there are proposals, but not that there is actually already a consensus about floating prices. It may sound like that.

I agree though (as stated already above) that squatting is not really a critical problem at the moment, and also that auctions are not a good idea. Besides, once .bit domains actually start getting used, I believe that both the ratio of valid/resolving domains will sharply rise and also the price of domains may rise intrinsically due to more demand / higher price for NMC. So it will remain to be seen what (if anything) we have to do.
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biolizard89
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Re: Proposal: Domains should be regularly auctioned

Post by biolizard89 »

domob wrote:
indolering wrote:We need a floating price point, one that can be loosely tied to a fiat currency and we have a pretty good idea of how to do it. We still need to do some research and run some models to figure it out, but at this point it's an engineering challenge not some fundamental design flaw.
Note that the "we have a pretty good idea of how to do it" here means that there are proposals, but not that there is actually already a consensus about floating prices. It may sound like that.

I agree though (as stated already above) that squatting is not really a critical problem at the moment, and also that auctions are not a good idea. Besides, once .bit domains actually start getting used, I believe that both the ratio of valid/resolving domains will sharply rise and also the price of domains may rise intrinsically due to more demand / higher price for NMC. So it will remain to be seen what (if anything) we have to do.
According to some math I did, if every person in the world owned one .bit domain and one id/ identity, plus a delegated dd/ name and idd/ name for security purposes, we would actually have to decrease the name fee to avoid running out of coins. So yeah, it's unclear what exactly will be necessary.
Jeremy Rand, Lead Namecoin Application Engineer
NameID: id/jeremy
DyName: Dynamic DNS update client for .bit domains.

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fresheneesz
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Re: Proposal: Domains should be regularly auctioned

Post by fresheneesz »

"You can't know what they are planning, or what they expect"
You're telling me any system couldn't know whether or not someone is squatting based on this definition, and you're right. But I was defining squatting, and this is it. That's the definition, regardless of how impossible it might be to reliably detect such a scenario.

Even tho the definition doesn't give us a black and white test for every situation, it allows us to reason about the efficacy of ways of minimizing the impact of squatters abusing the system. It allows us to theorize how much squatting would be prevented from my auction proposal.
Squatting is a solved problem
I didn't realize there were actual plans to raise renewal fees to significant levels. Is this actually the case? How is the price determined?
You think Microsoft or Yahoo wouldn't have pushed the price of Google.com up when it was a small company?
They could try, but a properly designed auctioning scheme should render the attempts of yahoo and microsoft ineffective. If yahoo and microsoft wanted google to pay $10k every renewal, with my proposal they would have to put $1 million on the line every renewal. I wouldn't think yahoo or microsoft would be willing to risk handing over a million dollars to their biggest competitor just to hassle their domain name. That would also be illegal with current domain squatting laws. So I don't think your case holds water there.
loosely tied to a fiat currency
Don't think there will be much support for that, given what supporters of bitcoins think of fiat currencies. Also, that would almost necessarily require centralized control of the renewal fee - something that is also a huge non-starter, for very good reasons.
at this point it's an engineering challenge not some fundamental design flaw
Making a distinction between a "fundamental flaw" and an "engineering challenge" is splitting hairs. My auction proposal is in fact a method to determine the "floating price point" you're talking about. It determines the price based on market value (bids in the auctions). I've solved your "engineering challenge".
"we would actually have to decrease the name fee to avoid running out of coins"
That's very interesting. I figured there was a major problem with destroying coins.

biolizard89
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Re: Proposal: Domains should be regularly auctioned

Post by biolizard89 »

fresheneesz wrote:
Squatting is a solved problem
I didn't realize there were actual plans to raise renewal fees to significant levels. Is this actually the case? How is the price determined?
I don't have a link handy, but basically the price would be determined by a median consensus. That means an attacker would need a majority of voting power to hijack the price, in which case we've already lost (that would be a 51% attack). It's more complicated than that summary, but that's the gist of it.
fresheneesz wrote:
You think Microsoft or Yahoo wouldn't have pushed the price of Google.com up when it was a small company?
They could try, but a properly designed auctioning scheme should render the attempts of yahoo and microsoft ineffective. If yahoo and microsoft wanted google to pay $10k every renewal, with my proposal they would have to put $1 million on the line every renewal. I wouldn't think yahoo or microsoft would be willing to risk handing over a million dollars to their biggest competitor just to hassle their domain name. That would also be illegal with current domain squatting laws. So I don't think your case holds water there.
If Yahoo or Microsoft could steal Google's domain name for a million USD, they probably would do so. A million dollars is pocket change to these companies, and being able to disrupt a competitor can be worth a lot more than that when the competitor is as big as Google. Keep in mind that we want to improve anonymity here too, so if the system works as intended it would be very difficult to determine who stole the domain, meaning filing a lawsuit would be very tricky. Also, I can guarantee you that the US military would have happily paid millions of dollars if it would have let them hijack WikiLeaks's domain.
fresheneesz wrote:
loosely tied to a fiat currency
Don't think there will be much support for that, given what supporters of bitcoins think of fiat currencies. Also, that would almost necessarily require centralized control of the renewal fee - something that is also a huge non-starter, for very good reasons.
You're wrong on all points here.
fresheneesz wrote:
at this point it's an engineering challenge not some fundamental design flaw
Making a distinction between a "fundamental flaw" and an "engineering challenge" is splitting hairs. My auction proposal is in fact a method to determine the "floating price point" you're talking about. It determines the price based on market value (bids in the auctions). I've solved your "engineering challenge".
I don't think you understand the distinction indolering was talking about. It's not splitting hairs; it's a matter of the issue you're trying to solve already having a proposed solution which is much simpler and isn't as vulnerable to censorship.
fresheneesz wrote:
"we would actually have to decrease the name fee to avoid running out of coins"
That's very interesting. I figured there was a major problem with destroying coins.
Not really a major problem, it's just something we have to adjust sometime before the whole world tries to use Namecoin. A floating name fee makes this problem go away.

For the record, I used to support an auction-like system; I have been convinced otherwise by several people.
Jeremy Rand, Lead Namecoin Application Engineer
NameID: id/jeremy
DyName: Dynamic DNS update client for .bit domains.

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fresheneesz
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Re: Proposal: Domains should be regularly auctioned

Post by fresheneesz »

You're wrong on all points here.
That's not constructive. Reasons please.
"I used to support an auction-like system"
If there's a floatable fee that can be adjusted to reasonable market values, I agree it goes pretty far toward minimizing squatters to only the most valuable domains. I think a more efficient solution exists, but I think it would be worth having both options available (ie a separate system competing with namecoin that has the auction scheme)

biolizard89
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Re: Proposal: Domains should be regularly auctioned

Post by biolizard89 »

fresheneesz wrote:
You're wrong on all points here.
That's not constructive. Reasons please.
Well, you could have read 2 paragraphs above where I implicitly gave reasons by explaining how the system actually worked. But since I guess you didn't do so, I'll repeat myself (explicitly this time). Cryptocurrency users don't have a problem with fiat currencies being used as a value reference. Why do you think most stores that accept Bitcoin (even Bitcoin-only stores) denote the value in USD? As long as fiat currencies are more stable in value relative to actual living costs than cryptocurrencies, that will be standard practice. What I think you actually meant (but didn't say) was that explicitly tying it to a single USD/NMC exchange would be bad. Which isn't what indolering and I proposed; see my explanation above which should have made it clear that it's not being explicitly tied to an exchange. And, as I also said above, there is no centralized control (unless a malicious entity has a majority of voting power, in which case all cryptocurrencies are screwed). (There are some potential modifications to the scheme which make it more resistant to malicious majority attacks, but they're not particularly relevant to this thread.)
fresheneesz wrote:
"I used to support an auction-like system"
If there's a floatable fee that can be adjusted to reasonable market values, I agree it goes pretty far toward minimizing squatters to only the most valuable domains. I think a more efficient solution exists, but I think it would be worth having both options available (ie a separate system competing with namecoin that has the auction scheme)
Sounds like you might like BitShares. Or feel free to start your own fork -- we can't stop you from doing so. I don't think many serious users will use a system where their names can be seized by an entity with a large supply of disposable income, but there's nothing preventing you from trying.
Jeremy Rand, Lead Namecoin Application Engineer
NameID: id/jeremy
DyName: Dynamic DNS update client for .bit domains.

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