The Breakdown - Are Uncensorable Web Domains Blockchain’s Next Killer App? With Namebase CEO Tieshun Roquerre

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

As claims of election tampering, fraud, and other dubious activities fly around the botched Democratic Caucus in Iowa, trust in our public institutions continues to crater.  The question of trust and censorship are at the heart of our episode today. Handshake is a new protocol for uncensorable web domains. The goal is to create a new blockchain-based Top Level Domain system that governments can’t censor or block.  To explain why Handshake (HNS) matters, @nlw is joined by Tieshun Roquerre, the CEO of Namebase, a next-generation domain registrar for HNS.  In this interview, they discuss:  What Handshake is  How a HNS domain is different from a standard web domain  Why uncensorable web domains are the next great blockchain killer app  How Roquerre became interested in the space How Namebase works 

Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW. The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk. Welcome back to The Breakdown. It is Tuesday, February 4th, and we have an interesting one today. We're going to be speaking with Tieschen Roguer of Namebase, which is building on Handshake, the just-launched decentralized DNS that is basically trying to make top-level domains, i.e. website links that are censorship-resistant, that can't be taken down by government censors. And today, I think, is a particularly interesting day to have that conversation for two reasons. The first is that Handshake has just gone live on Mainnet yesterday, and this is one of the more anticipated launches of the year. In fact,

my first exposure introduction to Handshake came when an investor who's a opinion I tend to agree with, said that it was the second use case of blockchain after money that actually got him excited, this idea of uncensurable web domains. So I think that's part one of why this is interesting is that it's happening now, right? A handshake is here after much anticipation. Part two is we have this interesting, weird little context of the debacle that was the Iowa caucuses last night. So for those of you who aren't in the U.S. or who simply don't pay attention to U.S. politics. Last night, the U.S. primary season kicked off with the Iowa caucuses.

Now, a caucus is not a blind vote or a secret hidden ballot like the vast majority of voting in the world. It's this weird, archaic community process of raising your hand in public and debating and having people come back and forth to you. It's a very, very strange format that seems to go against the idea of a secret ballot in so many ways. What's more, people have critiqued Iowa and the caucus system for a very long time for having a disproportionate amount of power because it kicks off the whole U.S. primary season. And basically what happens now is an endless sprint from state to state to state,

trying to win enough electoral votes to be the official nominee to go on to contest the actual general election. And the problem, according to some, with the idea of Iowa starting it, is that it really sets the tone and the momentum for the rest of the event. It gives this tiny little state a disproportionate amount of power. Well, Iowa may have driven the stake through its own heart last night because there was basically no ability to actually report results. There was widespread accusations of tampering. There was a new app that they implemented, willy-nilly, without a lot of testing, that has links to a company that had been used by three of the campaigns, Biden, Amy Kolobuchar, Pete Buttigieg. So the whole thing was an absolute catastrophe across the board. Even CNN's

headline says that Iowa delivers the first victory of the electoral season to Trump, right? It looked and seemed and is basically an example of just gross incompetence. But the relevant context, I think, and why it's worth bringing up is that all of this comes back to in some ways accusations of tampering and censorship and just people having less trust than ever in authority and in the governments that surround them, right? You have so many different camps right now accusing each other of things and people are just left in the middle to basically identity politic affiliate with whoever they think is least likely to be lying, which is a terrible way to comport a democracy. This is not about a blockchain voting idea or anything like that.

I think this is not simply put a software problem. However, I think it highlights the broader issues we have of trust in institutions and the need for truly censorship-resistant alternatives. I'm not talking about decentralized alternatives. I'm talking about the point of decentralization, which is censorship-resistance. So the idea, the hope for something like Handshake is that it will provide a censorship resistant alternative to top-level domains, such that governments with any agenda can't actually shut down websites in the same way, that people will be able to go get the information they want or need

or that is relevant to them outside of the ability of governments to control it. That's the goal, that's the hope. I asked Tie Aishan to join us because he has been invested in this space for a while. He was a Thiel Fellow. He dropped out of school to come work on this project and has a really interesting take on why it's so important. His company namebase is basically a domain registrar for this new uncensurable top-level domain ecosystem that is Handshake. So I'm going to turn it over now to the interview so you can just hear from him exactly why this is an interesting project and kind of come up with your judgments for yourself. All right, everyone. I am. I'm here with Tayshan. Hey, man, thank you so much for taking some time. I know today is a really busy day.

Yeah, no problem. It's happy to be on this podcast. I've been following you guys building name base for a little while now, and I've been following Handshake as well. I think I took note, actually, in particular when Eric Meltzer Weepon, he tweeted something to the effect of Handshake will be the second highly meaningful blockchain application, which is obviously a pretty big word. So, you know, for those folks who haven't spend as much time with Handshake. Maybe you could just give a little bit of a background around what it is and why it's so interesting or exciting. Yeah, totally. I'll give you like the quick explainer and then I'll give you some context on why I think that that statement will stand true. You know, you can think of Handshake. It's a protocol that functionally is actually very similar to Bitcoin, except instead of using the coins as money, you use the coin to register names on the

handshake blockchain. And these names are actually domain names. They're specifically top level domain names. So you know like a top level domain name at tlde.com.a.o. Dot net.org. These are all different TLDs. And what Handshake does is it lets you register new TLDs directly on the Handshake blockchain. And the benefit of these TLDs being on the Handshake blockchain is it makes these domains very difficult to censor or seize or tamper with. It lets you truly own your domain name, which is not something that's possible today. And it also makes it so that no governments or jurisdictions can block access to that domain name. So basically just provides like a set function improvement in terms of the user experience to the existing domain names of today.

The censorship resistance piece is the part that I think has people really fired up. And I guess, you know, for people who are keen on this idea of censorship resistance, but haven't thought about it in the context of domain names, why does it matter, for example, that domains would be censorship resistant? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think, you know, the easiest way to think about it is if you look at what's happening in the world today, you know, a few years ago, this wasn't, it didn't seem like as much of a problem, at least in the U.S., but basically over the past, you know, two, three years, it's been happening more and more where basically you see instances of censorship and control, information control,

from governments happening every day in every country. You know, some are doing it faster than others, but for example, you know, China, blocks, Reddit, BBC, the New York Times, dot-tokoe, and hundreds of other websites. You see Iran, they have repeatedly prevented access to websites like Facebook and Twitter. They even shut down their internet completely in 2019. In India, they're right now censoring dozens of regions because people are protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act, which basically marginalizes Muslims. So you're basically seeing that across the entire world, there's a great graphic by the

Freedom on the Internet.org Foundation. They basically are tracking freedom on the internet across the world. And across the board, it's just getting worse. And what we're seeing is the trend is that in 10 years' time, the internet that we know and love today, it's not going to be this global internet that you can access from anywhere and use any website. It's starting to be siloed, depending on which country you're in. And so they're putting up pretty much like physical barriers around each internet. The reason why that is is because China is basically exporting their version of the internet, which is very authoritarian to the rest of the world.

They're holding seminars with leaders of 36 different countries and helping them basically set up their own information control centers. That's basically what we're seeing right now today, and that's the trend. And the reason why Handshake is meaningful is because it basically can counter that. When you're using Handshake, it makes it very difficult to censor DNS, which is one of the basically first tricks that governments will use. And so Handshake directly prevents that. So what will it look like for a user who's actually using a Handshake top-level domain? Will it be any different from them? Is it like basically, is it just another part of this

balkanized siloed internet or does it function just in the same way that a website now would? Yeah, totally. So there's two different users, right? There's people who are actually setting up the domains, registering them, and then there's, you know, the end users of those domains. So as an end user, you basically will use Handshake. That's what's called an alternative route. But basically, you don't really even need to understand that. Basically, all you need to know is that to use Handshake, you just point your DNS Resolver to Handshake, just like you point your DNS Resolver to a Resolver like CloudFlare's

1.1.1.1.1.1.1. So basically, it just takes like two steps. It literally takes 10 seconds on your computer. and then you're pointing to handcheck, and then you can resolve the handcheck names. Got it. So it is different than just typing something into the browser line exactly as they had, but a minimally significant change that once you've learned can become just as fast, effectively. Is that a fair character?

Exactly. You make the change once on your device, and then you're done. And then we'll provide tooling that makes it very easy. We have confidence that this is, even though it is some friction, it's friction that people will put up with because they're already doing it for the existing DNS resolvers that have, you know, tens of millions of users. How different is this than just like trying to use like a VPN or something when you're trying to skirt one of these kind of like Balkanize Internet regimes?

Yeah, that's a great question. So VPNs are also a really good tactic for getting around some of these censorship issues. The challenge with VPNs is one, you're trusting the VPN provider to, you know, do good by you effectively, right? They're getting a lot of data. They're getting all of your traffic effectively and routing it through. their servers. And then the other thing is a lot of VPNs get blocked by governments. Because they're centralized entities, they're real companies. And so usually what ends up happening

is the really popular ones that are known, they end up getting blocked. And so it's a constant game of cat and mouse. And that's really what you see on the internet today is, you know, for any of these sites, you know, if you work hard enough, you can usually get access to it somehow. But the barrier to entry is really, really high. And the governments are just getting smarter and smarter about it. So tricks that worked 10 years ago really easily are now a little bit harder or now a little bit less reliable. And then with Handshake, what it is, it's saying that you don't need to have a Cat and Mouse game anymore. You just point your DNS to Handshake and then you're done. Your DNS won't be censored anymore. And the reason why that's the case is because Handshake is a

distributed network, the entire Handshake blockchain effectively needs to be censored in order for it to be taken down. And that's just prohibitively the expensive. It's pretty difficult. to do. And so that's why Handshake is providing a better alternative. Got it. Okay. So now tell me about NameBase because obviously that's the project that you're leading right now. Maybe tell us a little bit about NameBase, but also just what the ecosystem around Handshake looks like, right? So today, obviously, we were yesterday marked a big moment. But it would be interesting to hear just kind of like who all is in the space, what types of projects are in there. And then, of course, what you're specifically working on.

Namebase, the easy way to think about it is we're a domain registrar. and on ramp for the Handshake blockchain. So we sit on top of Handshake and just make it really easy to use. If you want to buy Handshake coins, you can do that on Namebase with Dollars or Bitcoin. And then if you want to use those coins to register the names, we have a GUI interface that basically just registers the names for you and the GoDaddy like experience.

And then you can manage your DNS settings just like you would, you know, in those registrars. So basically we're just infrastructure for making Handshake easy to use. In terms of the Handshake ecosystem overall, basically you have NameBase, which is a domain registrar, an on-ramp for Handshake. There are a few wallets out there. There's also miners. There's Six Block and Six Miner, which is actually a mining pool that we've partnered with

to actually provide liquidity early on. And I'll talk more about that in a second. There's also Handy Miner, H&S pool. There's a wallet Kiyokin that's been created as well. And in terms of the investors, Handshack has really full. phenomenal investors, pretty much like every top Silicon Valley firm has invested in them. A16Z, Sequoia, Founders Fund, Greylock. They're all investors in Handshake. And so these are the people who backed Facebook, Google, Slack, you know, WhatsApp, pretty much every company that you use today.

And so there's a lot of excitement behind it. How are you thinking about it? Maybe this is getting a little too in the weeds, but it's interesting to me. Like how do you as a new registrar for this think about pricing? The interesting thing about Handshake is it's not a flat fee for the domains. The reason why that you don't want that is because it basically allows, you know, whales to come on and just buy up all the good names really quickly. And that just destroys the equity value of the names. Instead, Handshake names are registered through a auction system. Basically, whoever wins the auction pays the second highest bidding price. So let's say you were trying to get dot Whitmore and you paid, you know, a thousand H&S, and I bid, you know, 500 H&S, you

would win and you'd be paying 500 H&S. And importantly, that's not going to any centralized entity or any company. That's just burned directly on the network. So it's basically saying you want that name the most, so you get it. And there's a cost, obviously, because otherwise if it was free, it wouldn't be worth anything. But then you get it. In terms of the costs on name base, we basically just offer that registration service for free.

Our position is that anything you can do on the Handshake blockchain for free outside of Namebase, you should be able to do it for free within Namebase. And we just make it even easier to use. There's just some nuance around like submitting transactions and submitting them at certain times over a period of a few weeks. And so we just abstract all that away. So you just kind of click on a button and then you're done. One last question that's a little bit more kind of on a personal level.

Like what made you decide to focus on this versus anything else in the crypto space, just anything else you could be building? Yeah, totally. That's a great question. And I think what's helpful is I can probably share a little bit of context on myself as well. So I'm a 2019 Teele fellow, especially this fellowship that funds people to leave school to start their own companies by Peter Thiel. Previously, I was starting math and computer science at MIT. And before MIT, I actually started another company called Straw Entro, which was funded by a white combinator. So I was in MIT, you know, exploring different ideas. And the thing that got me really excited, about Handshake. When I was in my first semester at MIT, I had the opportunity to travel to Turkey. My roommate before was Turkish, and so I went with him and we went there.

And Turkey was phenomenal, but the thing that really struck me was when I tried to access the internet, I was trying to access the website. I forget which one. It might have been like Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or WhatsApp, but it was blocked. It was pretty shocking

because that was my first experience ever with censorship. You know, like in the U.S., we don't really have issues with this yet. And so it wasn't something I was used to. But that experience was really eye-opening because I was like, whoa, like all these people don't have access to Wikipedia or YouTube. And I grew up learning how to program on YouTube and learning different subjects on Twitter and Wikipedia. So that was really eye-opening. But the thing is, when I thought about it, I was like, you know, I'm a single person.

There's like literally nothing I can do. So I just continued my trip and I didn't do anything about it. It felt wrong, but I just like went on my way. I went back to school. And then a few years later, I ran by chance met the Hanche team and I realized, oh, this is something that can actually solve that problem. And as I mentioned before, over the course of the next few years, I saw that the internet is getting more and more censored. It's getting more and more controlled. And if you think that's not a problem, you know, this censorship issue, it's really the reason why like slaves back in the day were never allowed historically to read and write.

It's why internet censorship is one of the first tools that countries use when they start getting protests. Information control is one of the most effective ways for governments to control their citizens, create silos and control their opinion. And even if it doesn't affect you personally, the second order effects are catastrophic because there's just so much easier to demonize an entire population when you can't communicate with them. And governments know that. So I saw that happening. and when I came across Handshake, it basically provided a path forward for fighting against this.

Basically, just by participating in Handshake, you're registering a name and sharing it with people and spreading it to the rest of the world. There's an opportunity to actually change how the internet works. So when I saw that, I personally became very excited because I was lucky enough to have that first exposure to censorship and see kind of what the rest of the world was experiencing, pretty much every country outside the U.S. and Canada has significant. against censorship issues, information control, they don't really have freedom and safety on the internet. And that's really why handshake can enable. It can bring freedom and safety to the internet.

So that's why I'm working on it today. I feel like the crypto community has been talking about this all weekend, first in the context of Zero Hedge and Twitter, and then in the context of China restricting or basically taking individuals offline who had been exposed to the coronavirus, or at least there's machinations around that. And then even in Canada, there's a new report out that's making a recommendation that the Canadian government ask websites, basically that distribute information to register to actually have a license, which, I mean, holding aside the phenomenal difficulty and seeming to implement that would be a pretty significant departure from the internet as we've known it.

So I think definitely this domain of challenges and problems is something that it's good that there's a lot more focus on. And I'm excited to see what Handshake and what you guys at Namebase do. So thank you again so much for hanging out for a little while today. And best of luck with the launch. Yeah, thank you. We're opening up our wait list starting today, actually. So it's a good time for us to be having this conversation.

It's actually kind of backed up. So we're probably not going to get to the entire list over the course of the next few days. But yeah, people are starting to sign on and we're seeing a lot of exciting. Where can people find you? Yeah, on Twitter at Tieshan R. But really the best place is just to go to namebase.com and sign on to our waitlist and follow us on at namebase HQ. I think that's a conversation that we really could have pushed even farther.

There's no doubt to me that Handshake is an incredibly powerful concept. I tend to agree with Tieshan that it's hard from our context in America in particular, for those of the listeners who are in the same political context that I am, to imagine the need, the urgency of this sort of uncensurable information. I hope that we continue to be able to leave this in the category of the nearly unimaginable. However, I think for many parts of the world, the assumption of information independence is simply not one that they have, right? It's a fundamentally different context that they live in, and it is authoritarianism, not freedom, that is the norm. Living in that type of setting, and having operated in that type of setting,

having uncensurable information is a phenomenally powerful concept. Now, of course, the questions that we could delve into have to do with execution. One of the biggest issues for many of those who are watching from the outside is the economics of the system. This is designed around a native token, and native tokens historically have been primarily good at enriching the people who create tokens versus actually providing the utility that they are supposed to have. Now, I think in many ways, the problem of utility tokens and tokenization had to do with the way that they were offered through the ICO system, more than a by definition intrinsic failure of them. In fact, I don't believe that we've actually seen a full-fledged experiment in what a tokenized network economy can actually do in terms of making a network

like this work. So I'm willing to suspend disbelief, let's say, and see what happens. But I do believe that that is going to be perhaps the major question that Handshake will have to deal with. And any business that's built on top of Handshake will have to deal with. However, for me, the goal, the idea is powerful enough that it's something that I think we should at least be paying attention to. So I hope you enjoyed this interview and let me know what you think. At NLW on Twitter, nlw.substack.com for the newsletter, and I will catch you soon. Cheers, guys.