The_General
Established Member
- Impact
- 18
First off, sorry for the clickbaity title - I'll get to that in a minute.
I've been researching cryptocurrencies for a couple of years now and there's been an increasing amount of speculation about how the internet will be accessed and stored in the future. Ethereum has gained massive attention recently but what I thought was interesting was their ENS (like DNS) system for converting hex to words will essentially mean a new sort of tld when it applies to their distributed network (Swarm).
ENS have recently started auctioning off domains through 3 day auctions that are initiated by a registration. Currently they are only allowing 7 letter domains and the top sale is darkmarket.eth for about 20,000ETH which at the time of writing is about $5 million (given the volatile market, it could be $50m or maybe zero dollars when you read this). I think the buyers probably bought into ETH when it was less than a dollar but nevertheless, check out the top sales:
http://etherscan.io/ens?filter=mostexpensive
The speculation is astounding given that whilst they may have bought into ETH cheaply, there is real world value today that they could have in cash. In order to sell these domains later for profit (some names are clearly investment names and some aren't), Ethereum would need to become adopted by the general public, Swarm would need to take a significant chunk of the traffic from WWW and it would need to beat off the current and future competitors offering this type of technology. And you thought ngtlds were speculative! Having said that, big businesses are backing these and other technologies and I think although this may not be the time, it would be naive to say the Internet will stay in its current form forever.
Could an alternative to the WWW make .com obsolete in your lifetime? Would you register domains on a new technology that have a tiny chance of success so that you can be an early adopter? What do you think of the domains that are being registered and do you think any of the registrants are namepros members?!
I've been researching cryptocurrencies for a couple of years now and there's been an increasing amount of speculation about how the internet will be accessed and stored in the future. Ethereum has gained massive attention recently but what I thought was interesting was their ENS (like DNS) system for converting hex to words will essentially mean a new sort of tld when it applies to their distributed network (Swarm).
ENS have recently started auctioning off domains through 3 day auctions that are initiated by a registration. Currently they are only allowing 7 letter domains and the top sale is darkmarket.eth for about 20,000ETH which at the time of writing is about $5 million (given the volatile market, it could be $50m or maybe zero dollars when you read this). I think the buyers probably bought into ETH when it was less than a dollar but nevertheless, check out the top sales:
http://etherscan.io/ens?filter=mostexpensive
The speculation is astounding given that whilst they may have bought into ETH cheaply, there is real world value today that they could have in cash. In order to sell these domains later for profit (some names are clearly investment names and some aren't), Ethereum would need to become adopted by the general public, Swarm would need to take a significant chunk of the traffic from WWW and it would need to beat off the current and future competitors offering this type of technology. And you thought ngtlds were speculative! Having said that, big businesses are backing these and other technologies and I think although this may not be the time, it would be naive to say the Internet will stay in its current form forever.
Could an alternative to the WWW make .com obsolete in your lifetime? Would you register domains on a new technology that have a tiny chance of success so that you can be an early adopter? What do you think of the domains that are being registered and do you think any of the registrants are namepros members?!
