For those who are also active on Twitter, you might notice some users having display names that end with .eth. Those are actually registered names through the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) and in this post I will explain what the names do and how you can get yours.
DNS vs ENS
For those who are slightly more techie, you probably know about domain name service or DNS. Our computers connects to each other through IP addresses. DNS helps us by converting IP addresses that look like this (104.27.177.155) to easier names like steempeak.com. The Ethereum Name Service or ENS does basically the same thing.
The key difference between ENS and DNS is that, ENS is decentralized and DNS is centralized. Do you know that every .com domain registered, fees are given to a central registrar? The registrar for .com domains is VeriSign and every registered domain will need to pay an annual fee for it. Since these domain names are registered and stored with a centralized party, it is in fact a single point of failure with great risk.
ENS offers a different approach by storing these information on the decentralized Ethereum blockchain. Through smart contracts, the registration process is fully automated and pretty much seamless. As a result, we have an infrastructure that mitigates the risk of single point of failure.
Currently, the main use case of ENS is to resolve a Ethereum address to a .eth name. For example, culgin.eth gets resolves to 0xcfa69328a74c0eac388b889c21eb3ddd9d41a025 (my Ethereum address). Below is a screenshot of how ENS can be looked up on EtherScan.
However, ENS can do much more. It can technically be used to resolve to IP addresses as well but more importantly, it can also be resolved to addresses of other coins! The only caveat is that the wallet you are using must be able to support it. Thankfully, quite a number of wallets are supporting ENS already. You can check the list below.
Source
As the usage of ENS increases, more wallets and dApps are expected to follow suit. To learn how to register your own ENS name, you can follow this excellent guide by Chris Bell.
Bringing ENS to Steemians
Recently @kadjar written a post on "Tides of Magic", which is a trading card game leveraging the Ethereum blockchain. As part of the launch, the game developers will be airdropping free card packs to Steemians and in the post, @kadjar was asking everyone to leave their Ethereum address as comments so that they can receive the airdrop.
The response was good (everyone loves freebies right?) and there were over 120 comments. As I scroll through the comments, I can't help but noticed that none of the Steemians, except for me, is using an ENS name. All of them are listing their Ethereum addresses as a long string of gibberish text.
To me, I think that ENS names are a better representation of an Ethereum address which makes it easy to remember. In addition, prominent names in the crypto-space are also starting to use ENS names, including Vitalik Buterin.
Given these benefits, I thought everyone should get an ENS name. However, I acknowledge that there are some hurdles that Steemians will need to overcome.
Hurdles for Steemians
There are a few obstacles that Steemians will need to overcome in order to have their own ENS names. First, they need to own some ETH. Recall that the ENS uses Ethereum Smart Contracts to fully automate the process of name registration. Hence, it is mandatory to buy your ENS name with ETH. While it is easy to create an Ethereum address to start receiving ETH payments, not all Steemians own ETH and many probably do not want to take the risk to buy ETH just to create an ENS name.
Next, creating a name requires certain technical know-hows. While Chris Bell's guide is comprehensive and easy to follow. There are certain pre-requisites that the guide assumes the users already know. For instance, you need the Metamask plugin and know how to use it.
Finally, the cost of it. The ENS charges a flat fee of US$5 for 1 year lease of an ENS name. For users who just want to try it out, he/she may not want to pay the $5 fee. In addition, the fee is collected in ETH. Since there is a good chance that ETH can appreciate in the future, some users would rather keep their ETH than to spend it on an ENS which may or may not yield much benefits.
Recognizing all these concerns, I have decided to a service here on Steem so that you can get your own ENS names in a risk-free way.
The Steem.ENS Service
Like traditional DNS, ENS also allows for sub-domains to be created. As such I have purchased a number of Steem related ENS names and decided to help you create your own ENS names. By sub-domains, it means that the name will come in 3 chunks instead of 2. For example, culgin.steemleo.eth can also resolves to my ETH address as seen below.
I think having a Steem-related sub-domain allows you to kind of promote Steem as well whenever you use it, especially if you decide to update your Twitter display name to a .eth name. Not only you are promoting Steem, you will also be able to attract some followers who are fans of Ethereum :)
While I said that this service will allow you to get your ENS in a risk-free way, it does not mean entirely cost-free. As each sub-name registration will cost me a bit of ETH (gas fees to interact with the smart contracts), at this point, I am thinking of having Steemians to delegate SP to lease their ENS names. This will allow me to earn the gas fees through curation rewards and also support other Steem projects through upvotes.
At a later date, I will be announcing the full list of supported ENS names and the service model. For now, I will like to get an interest check. For those who are keen to engage my service, please leave a comment and let me know. It will be even better if you can join my Discord server and follow my service account @steem.ens so that we can have a discussion on this.
Thanks!
10% of post rewards goes to @ph-fund and 5% goes to @leo.voter to support these amazing projects.
This article is created on the Steem blockchain. Check this series of posts to learn more about writing on an immutable and censorship-resistant content platform:
- What is Steem? - My Interpretation
- Steem Thoughts - Traditional Apps vs Steem Apps
- Steem Thoughts - A Fat or Thin Protocol?
- Steem Thoughts - There is Inequitable Value Between Users and Apps
- Make my votes count! Use Dustsweeper!
- What caused STEEM to get dumped? Why I think the worst might be over
- Steem 2020 is about having a "SMART U"
Hello @culgin,
very nice idea to share this on here! I cannot see the need to do this for my username and I don't hold eth in significant amounts either. I use it were I want/need to use it (transfers between exchanges for instance or claiming my Hex (Hahaha!) but not much more!
Upvoted and resteemed!
Cheers!
Lucky
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Greetings appreciated @culgin.
This is the best article I have read in a long time.
I enjoyed the reading, it caught me from the first paragraph.
The comparison with DNS was very exemplifying.
I think it's great that we can substitute a hash for an expression with grammar representative and easy to read.
In addition to these 5 usd we must also consider the GAS.
So how will you cover the costs for the Steem.ENS service? With the delegations you could receive, you cannot cover them.
Are 5 usd for each eth account that is opened?
Another thing.
It is always advisable to use many eth addresses for our transactions. That is, they are disposable. This is a safety measure to avoid traces. For example, despite having little experience in ethereum, I have used many addresses.
So what will happen when I decide to open a new wallet?
Or rather, what would happen to my ENS name if I decide to have another eth wallet?
Your friend, Juan.
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Hi @juanmolina, great questions! For "sub-name" creations, there is no need to pay additional USD5 for them. For example, if I already purchased juanmolina.eth, I do not need to pay another USD5 to create awesome.juanmolina.eth. However, I do need to waste some ETH GAS to create the record by interacting with the smart contracts.
Hence, what I did was that I have purchased a number of Steem related names for potential users to choose from to create the sub-names. For instance, I am now the owner of steemnetwork.eth and steemleo.eth. I therefore do not need to pay additional USD5 to create culgin.steemnetwork.eth or culgin.steemleo.eth. I just need to pay some GAS.
So, I should be able to cover the costs through curation rewards by receiving delegations from Steemians. At this point I just hope to cover costs and bring the concept of ENS to Steemians so that we can all benefit from its convenience.
Regarding your next question. It is true that some privacy advocates advise to use different ETH addresses each time for your transaction. The idea is that you do not want a public address to be easily traceable to your identity. However, for people like us who are building a following on social media, we have kind of "given up" our need to remain truly anonymous. For instance, you cannot be changing your Steem username all the time for each transaction, can you? :)
The recommendation is to tag an ETH address that you don't mind being linked to you to the ENS name. This should generally be used to receive donations or for publicity. For other sensitive transactions, you should still want to use other ETH addresses that are not linked to your public image.
I hope that clear some of your doubts and I noticed that you have joined my Discord server, so we can always discuss more over there :)
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I really like your equanimity.
You have fully answered my questions.
Thank you very much dearest friend.
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I have to be in full agreement with this particular sentence, after all it is what made the development of DNS necessary.
The idea of promoting the use of smart contracts for an alternative system to current DNS sounds interesting. You comment that work well to address wallet and app addresses, I am interested that you also comment that you can point to an IP and that would allow you to replace the current domain name system.
Who knows? Maybe in the future, when we discuss the name registration for a new site or platform, instead of being "It has to be .COM or nobody is going to find it" becomes "It absolutely has to be .ETH"
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Indeed. I think it is a better system and it does have the potential to take off 😉
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Great article mate ^^
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Thanks!
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Hello @culgin
Thank you for followed @haccolong account. As a thanks, this post has been randomly selected and upvoted by @hoaithu's Curation Trail !.
To earn more rewards with your Steemit account. Check through some of the ways at this post.
I will continue with random upvotes in the future &wish you lots of luck :)
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This post received a 31% vote from @randowhale thanks to @culgin! All funds sent to @randowhale will be used to improve the SBD peg and will be burned at a later date.
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