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f note lack of adoption
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TheBlueMatt committed Feb 11, 2024
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Expand Up @@ -55,7 +55,9 @@ Payment instructions with on-chain addresses SHOULD be rotated as regularly as p
There are many existing schemes to resolve human-readable names to cryptocurrency payment instructions. Sadly, these current schemes suffer from a myriad of drawbacks, including (a) lacking succinct proofs of namespace to public key mappings, (b) revealing sender IP addresses to recipients or other intermediaries as a side-effect of payment, (c) relying on the bloated TLS Certificate Authority infrastructure, or (d) lacking open access, not allowing anyone to create a namespace mapping.

=== DNS Rather than blockchain-based solutions ===
There are variable blockchain-based alternatives to the DNS which feature better censorship-resistance and, in many cases, security. However, here we chose to use the standard ICANN-managed DNS namespace as many blockchain-based schemes suffer from (a), above (though in some cases this could be addressed with cryptographic SNARK schemes). Further, because they do not have simple client-side querying ability, many of these schemes use trusted intermediaries which resolve names on behalf of clients. This reintroduces drawbacks (b) and often (c) as well.
There are many blockchain-based alternatives to the DNS which feature better censorship-resistance and, in many cases, security. However, here we chose to use the standard ICANN-managed DNS namespace as many blockchain-based schemes suffer from (a), above (though in some cases this could be addressed with cryptographic SNARK schemes). Further, because they do not have simple client-side querying ability, many of these schemes use trusted intermediaries which resolve names on behalf of clients. This reintroduces drawbacks (b) and often (c) as well.

Finally, its worth noting that none of the blockchain-based alternatives to the DNS have had material adoption outside of their specific silos, and committing Bitcoin wallets to rely on a separate system which doesn't see broad adoption may not be sustainable.

=== DNS Rather than HTTP-based solutions ===
HTTP(s)-based payment instruction resolution protocols suffer from drawbacks (a), (b), and (c), above, and generally shouldn't be considered a serious alternative for payment instruction resolution.
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