There's nothing "unstoppable" about these "domains"
published: 2024-01-02
By now, anyone paying attention to web3 is more than aware that the vast majority of products with a blockchain attached are only useful for sending your money into a black hole. Well, to be more accurate, sending your money to one of many fly-by-night VC startups whose product they give you in return sends itself to the black hole. You could wake up tomorrow and find the value of your tokens dropped by 90% and are effectively worthless; you could wake up tomorrow to find your hardware wallet is malfunctioning and you didn't properly back it up; you could wake up after attending a party with other "bagholders" and find yourself blinded and in excruciating pain. Web3 projects have yet to prove themselves superior to the parts of the Internet they seek to replace: the games are boring and janky if even existent (and half don't even have a blockchain implemented), the social media sites have barely anybody on there who isn't a spammer or grifter, and I have yet to find a way of actually hosting a website purely on web3 that doesn't involve shelling out to IPFS. Blockchain is, in essence, a solution in search of a problem.
So I was excited to find a project claiming to solve an actual problem the Internet has: the centralization of domain ownership. Sure, there are tons of registrars out there, but they all have to answer to ICANN if they want the domains they sell to be accessible on the open Internet without requiring their users to change their DNS settings (like OpenNIC). And switching to an alternate DNS root like OpenNIC doesn't fix the problem, just shifts the nature of the organization responsible from "ran by the United States government" to "ran by a non-profit". If you're running a site with politically controversial material, who would you rather be censored by? The United States government, or whatever random OpenNIC resolver decided to blacklist you that day?
Oh, neither? Well, let's see what Unstoppable Domains has to offer.
But before we do that, we need to take a detour. Because the thing with web3, if you've been living under a rock, is that everything is paywalled. Everything requires a device you can install a wallet on ("go fuck yourself" seems to be web3's answer to people who only have access to school/library computers) and an initial investment in someone else's shitcoin and then enough technological literacy to not immediately destroy one's money by signing a malicious transaction or sending their coins to the void.
So what is a Broke Dumbass, or someone who's just broke, supposed to do? Even if you have a device you can install Chromium and MetaMask on and you know the basic warning signs of a scam, how do you do anything without tokens? You could try selling services to others and hope they send you crypto as payment, but then you have to accrue enough of a single token to meet the minimum threshold for most apps to allow swapping to a different token, and that's assuming the transaction fees don't wipe out a huge enough chunk of your coins to not be worth it, and that's assuming anyone wants to commission you anyway. You could try running a vanitygen and then putting the results through a script like BurnedBitcoinAddresses to mass-check for wallets with coins in them, but I've been doing that for almost a year now and I've never discovered a single wallet with an existing balance. You could try begging for someone to take pity on you and pay your initial fees to get into the network...
...which seems to be a popular idea, popular enough that there are automated systems called "faucets" that will "drip" you tiny amounts of their preferred shitcoin. I hate prostrating myself to random strangers on the Internet, so for the purposes of this post I attempted to find a faucet that would give me enough cryptocurrency to buy a domain from Unstoppable Domains without spending any of my own money.
Here I must rant: the vast majority of ad-supported faucets, survey websites, and other websites that promise you money in exchange for doing tasks for them are SCAMS. They want you to waste hours upon hours of your time grinding in poorly-made mobile games and doing surveys that ask you for all your personal information in exchange for pennies. I am not exaggerating: the only legitimate faucet I've ever come across that didn't require me to rape myself with Know Your Customer identity verification and qualifying for seven hundred surveys before paying out rewarded me each week for my diligence in logging in hourly during all my waking hours with... ten cents a week! And this was with occasionally doing some of the offerwalls! (Goddess knows how many TerraYou enneagram tests I speedran...) I make more money than that at work when I put myself in Manual Outbound and set my headset down and slip into my bathroom for a minute to take a shit. And that doesn't require me to peruse any offerwalls: looking at the app faucet I have on my phone one more time and opening the RevU offerwall, Raid Shadow Legends (yes, that Raid) wants me to spend a week of my life grinding in exchange for... eight dollars. They really expect me (and you, and anyone else desperate enough to get suckered into these offerwalls) to spend a whole week glued to my phone tap-tap-tapping away for less money than it takes to buy a pizza. And that's assuming the offerwalls don't just straight up refuse to pay. I make more than twice Raid's payout an hour at my job, and many weekends I don't even have to work at work since there aren't enough dials to keep busy all the time.
...This isn't a post about offerwalls, so let's focus again on Unstoppable Domains. I looked up mayvaneday.x, since .x is the first supported TLD they list on the homepage, and I was met with a list of prices for all the TLDs Unstoppable Domains offers. All of these domains have a one-time price attached, ranging from ten to sixty dollars, with the exception of mayvaneday.eth which would have been sixty-five dollars plus fees (as .eth is actually part of ENS, which isn't owned by Unstoppable, and ENS and Unstoppable are actually in the middle of a catfight over who invented blockchain domains) and mayvaneday.com, which is a normal domain that also happens to come with an Unstoppable "smart contract" domain.
We want to buy the cheapest domain possible, which is $10, but knowing that cryptocurrencies often have transaction fees, we better bump that up to $15. If my Android cryptocurrency faucet gives me ten cents a week, according to my calculator, that would add up to...
...seventy-five weeks. A year and a half. A year and a half! A year and a half of clicking, clicking, clicking... And that's assuming you diligently log in every hour of every day, and you somehow find offerwalls that aren't scams, and you have your payouts sent to a wallet that won't eat half your tokens when you eventually need to swap from Litecoins or whatever to Ethereum.
Or you could pretend to be a developer and get a free Unstoppable domain that way.
So my three weeks of slogging through faucets were for nothing.
As Unstoppable's documentation reads more like bad ad copy, I'll save you the time and summarize: any domain that begins with the string uns-devtest is completely free on all TLDs with the aforementioned exceptions of .com and .eth. (The documentation says this string is udtestdev, but all domains beginning in this say "unreleased" on the purchase screen and can't be used.) You still have to connect a wallet like MetaMask, but you don't have to pay any gas fees or even have any MATIC tokens in your wallet. The domain functions exactly the same as any other. (At least, as far as I could tell.)
With this trick in mind, I managed to get myself the free domain uns-devtest-1114.x.
My next step was to get a website on it. I believed this would be a straightforward task like setting up DNSLink was for mayvaneday.org and how it appears to be for ENS. My site already has an IPNS hash, so theoretically all I needed to do was give this hash to Unstoppable Domains and everything would be taken care of. So I ventured to "My Domains", then "Manage", then "Website", then "Manage Website". And...
Huh? My IPNS hash is valid. I know because I made it with edie. I know because it works with ipfs cat. I know because it works with clearnet IPFS gateways. Does Unstoppable Domains really only support plain IPFS hashes that I'd have to log in after every site change to update?
If you were to use IPNS you would need to run a local IPFS node on your computer, upload the new files, obtain the IPFS hash and add it to your IPNS address. You would then need to pin the hash on a pinning service so your site is available when your computer is offline. With a Web3 domain from Unstoppable Domains you just need to upload your website files and we take care of the rest.
Okay... but I don't want you to take care of the rest. I just want you to give me a damn domain so I can set everything else up myself. I want to set A and AAAA and TXT records so I can do what I want with the domain elsewhere instead of putzing around in your walled garden. And, hey, aren't these domains supposed to be decentralized? Why does the documentation make it sound like you're the only way to fetch and update data on these domains? Why do I have to go through your web interface or API for any of this? Why, in 2022, did you mass-disable domains that you weren't supposed to be able to?
Why does this all sound like an overhyped scam that doesn't actually deliver what normal people would consider a domain?
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander