Handshake 🤝, A peer-to-peer root naming system.
What is a naming system?
We know that the internet is a system or a network that connects multiple computers and allows them to communicate. Those computers identify each other using a set of numbers called IP addresses. When users navigate through the internet or looking for websites, they must know the location of the websites (their IP address). Since the IP address is a collection of 4 numbers, it is not easy for humans to remember. Therefore, the naming system comes to help.
A naming system creates a better way to navigate through the internet. It translates a human-readable text into the corresponding IP address for the service they are looking for. For example, instead of typing in 142.250.186.78, users can just type in “google.com” and let the naming system do its job.
Is there any problem with the naming system?
Nowadays, we use the ICANN standard for the naming system. There are ~1500 top-level domains like .com, .net, .org, and so on. To have a domain name, clients need to register for second-level domains, which means that it will be something.com or example.net. Also, clients do not own domain names, they rent domain names and pay the registrar annually. Domain registration is also highly centralized. Centralization has advantages as well as disadvantages.
Handshake presents a new way by adopting decentralization. It let clients own a domain, more precisely, top-level domains. So, users can own .handshake or .medium. That being said, the user will also own something.handshake and example.handshake.
Email became Gmail, usenet became reddit, blog replies became facebook and Medium, pingbacks became twitter, squid became Cloudflare, even gnutella became The Pirate Bay. Quoted from handshake.org
How does Handshake work?
Handshake presents an alternative to using centralized authority by using the decentralized consensus system in the same way bitcoin use. Handshake protocol generates HNS tokens as its currency. The first lot of HNS is distributed to open sources developer around the world and it is mine-able.
Clients, instead of register for domains, bid for the ownership of domains. Browsers still don’t support handshake protocol at the moment, but it’s possible to navigate in handshake network by using hns.to service, or by configuring a hdns.
HNS.TO
hns.to is a simple service that helps navigate around the handshake network. It enables accessing Handshake domains like handshake/ by appending “.hns.to” (e.g. handshake.hns.to).
HDNS
Instead of having to append hns.to, one can configure a DNS to resolve handshake name directly. Guide and information are presented on the hdns.io website.
Final thought
Despite that handshake is still not accessible by normal means, it’s the experimental system that shoves the way to a decentralized network where no organization, government, or any kind of authority can censor. Later on, Handshake might be accepted widely and become the “standard” of the internet.
If this interested you, come join us with Handshake!