Decentralized Digital IDs with ENS Domains

When someone wants to send you crypto or an NFT, it's silly to try to tell them your wallet address. Oh, you can send them to 0X5C capital B349K capital. You get it within s domains. You've got a simple identification for your wallet that can receive your crypto. It's decentralized and empowering. We'll talk today with Corey Whitaker of NS Labs so you can understand why having your digital identity in short form is important and how you can too.

It's missing. Who's bad?

Oh, Trav, it's not pronounced anus. It's eons. Mm.

I was just really grateful that you didn't blurt out penis.

Why would I blurt out it out?

You said eons and since. And the. The pianist.

I mean.

Now you play guitar. When you play guitar, you're a pianist. You know.

I left the blurting to you and you. You took the bait.

Totally blurted, I'm the blurt, Daddy.

You're the master baiter. You took the master away. Welcome to the Bad Crypto podcast show for the crypto Curious Crypto serious and those who enjoy a little bit of humor, a little bit of levity in their crypto programming because it's so serious out there right now. It's a, you know, crypto. BlackRock is coming in and they're taking over the world and there's ETFs and we're all so serious. And you know what? Life is short. Carpe diem, Have some fun.

Yeah. In this episode right here is going to teach you or tell you a little bit about domains and how you might want to use them to connect your crypto addresses to this. So with that, let's go.

Distributed digital identity on blockchain and in the world. This is important stuff we need to be talking about. And one company that has been leading the way in this space, you know them. You might not know them by name, but you know them because you've seen their product all over the blockchain space, especially in the form of wallets.

Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here, fellas.

Yeah, I did not get Joel that either, but by the time that I come around for that, somebody had snagged that that other Joel there's only two of us and that other guy. Got it.

Yeah.

I actually got gold on.

Well, man, we're glad you're here. And why don't you go ahead and let's just. Let's talk a little bit about what NS is and then we'll talk about some of the reasons that this is important and how people are using it.

So what is it? What it's about? So all of your listeners, everyone has been using the Web for for quite some time now. The websites that we actually go to are our IP addresses. 1230.4560.789.

And did you just hack me, bro? Because that was my that was my IP. Yeah. How do you know that? Who told you?

Hey. Hey. Everything is public these days, right? Right. So what has happened is the DNS system has overlaid human readable language on these websites so that you can go to Google.com instead of the IP address. You can go to any of these websites using a human readable name. Since blockchain, the advent of blockchain, all of our wallet addresses these things that we're using to connect, to, to,

Have it memorized? 0X4B Capital C29. Yeah.

You know, some people have. I'd be interested to meet to meet some of those folks.

If you could just send me some crypto over at 1X294. Exactly. Like what? No way. This is horrible. Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. And that is one of the major issues preventing adoption, just the complexity of our these identities that we're using. So what does put human readable names on top of your your wallet address so that your Joe cometh? And when you want to send bitcoin Joe Smith recognizes it's on the Bitcoin network sends bitcoin to Bitcoin wallet address recognizes if you're on the Ethereum network sends Ethereum

So let me clarify that real quick. Yeah. So you can have multiple chains connected to that particular one. So you doesn't need to have Joe Btcc. Joe, that's counterintuitive to most folks, but I'm thinking if I want to send Joe eath, I'm going to send it to Joe Smith. If I want to send emphatic, it's probably a different address. If I'm going to send him Bitcoin, I'm not going to send it to Joe Smith. Right, right.

Yeah. This is something I think a lot of people don't realize that with your domain, you can add your Bitcoin address, your Ethereum address, your stellar address, your Hedera address, and it functions on each of those those chains. So it's not just Ethereum. Sometimes I like to call it the Everything name service, not just the Ethereum name service because we function across multiple chains.

Logical sense to me then to have it as the crypto or something, because then it could. Then it's almost like a chain that goes everywhere. So let me ask you this. I know there's some other chains. Are there some other like address stuff out there? Which ones are the ones? Is is not the only ones the Ethereum names. Is that the only one that domains supplies? Yes. Yes.

So that is the only one that we work on. The only one that that we developed. And again, since it's it's multi-chain we think it serves the the entire ecosystem. Yeah.

So when I log into my account, I also see a Joel comedically. What is that?

Decentraland. So one of the cool things about, about Ian's and the protocol is that you can, you can take other domains and import them into, into Ian's. So DCL I believe that is the decentraland domain where people on Decentraland are able to use Ian's addresses.

Well, there you go. I did not know that. Did what? I have set that up or would they have assigned that to me just by connecting the wallet?

I think you would have to you would have to set that up after you create your Decentraland account.

One of the many things that I've done in crypto that I don't remember because we've been doing this for so many years now, I'm wondering like, okay, where's the lost wallet that I've forgotten about and I don't even know was lost? And will it turn up someday?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One of my, one of my questions on this is that I have challenges is can I, can I connect multiple eath to the same wallet? Right. Because it's like I have my Twitter handle, which is t w t e dubia so I have that dot eath, but I also own Travis, right? And then somebody might not remember, Oh, am I going to send it to T.W. or am I going to send it to Travis? Right. Dot Eve Which one's the right one? Can you connect multiple addresses to that same wallet?

Yeah, you can connect multiple addresses to to, to a given wallet. Yeah.

So, you know, for example, I've got nifty company and nifty showing are in the the same wallet here, but only one of them can be active and point to the the actual address. Right. Or can either of them point to the same address.

Only one. Only one can be your primary name. Right. The primary name for a wallet. But you can add it to others as well.

Okay. So the whole point of this, besides taking complexity out of these long addresses, is there's a lot more to this than just that the simplification, this this decentralized digital identification. Let's talk a little bit about the benefits of that besides convenience. Yeah.

Yeah. So if you think about what we've experienced since the advent of of social media, right over the last 20 ish, 20 years, where our identities are are owned by these these corporate entities, whether it's Facebook or Twitter, even Friendster back in the day. Right. You log into the site and put all your information and they own it. And if you choose to move to another property, another

Well, so so I'm looking at the website here and I am going through the step by step process of this. So you don't necessarily have to use a dot eath. It looks to me like I could use a.com if I wanted to, but I just have to go through a process, find the original DNS domain name that I want to import into my NS, and then I can actually use that. Like if I wanted to use Travis, right, I could potentially use that as my address if I wanted. Right.

There you go. It gets deeper. It just deeper and deeper with. So again, one of the cool things that you can do is import DNS names. You see a.xyz. There are several out there that you can use as an NS name. So that's absolutely right. You can import your into the system.

I'm looking for where one does that on the site, because I own Joel. How would I use that as an address?

Yep. So I can actually. So you had a how to do all that offline?

I'll include that in the show notes because I got a link. That's the medium article right there too, that shows the step by step on how to do that. But I guess the real question would be is if he swapped swapped over his Joe comm, would that eliminate his website? It pointing to the website. Now it points to Ian's domains or does it? Can you use it as both?

Yeah, good question. These are these are two different rails. The traditional web two rail, your.com would continue to function as it normally does in the web two world and then in the web three world. Your would function as an NS name being able to log into coinbase metamask sending crypto back and forth.

Yeah.

So, you know, people who are coming late to the game like, oh, my name's gone. You know, it's a sadness. I'm John Smith. Let's see if it's available. Oh, no, that's that's long gone. What's you know, what do you recommend is the best process for picking a name that basically you're going to live with? Because this is this is your new digital identity?

Yep. Yep. So there is hope. So there are a lot of folks that are actually selling names on on the secondary market. So, Jill, I don't know if the other Joel is going to going to be able to sell you, Joel, or if he wants to give that up. But, you know, there's a slight chance people will sell their their first names. So that's one. Secondly, as you mentioned, you have the ability to import another DNS like a.com or a.xyz. So if you have a pretty cool. Com or x, y, z, you can import it and use

So is that technically an NFT? Then it's and that's this domain name. It's technically an NFT. So if you you're talking secondary market, people would want to go on opensea or whatever and then go and grab the file or be able to, to put the offer on the domain.

That's right. You can go to any of those marketplaces. And a native marketplace is vision, which is another great marketplace where you can search and support to find and name it.

Ian's dot vision. Yep. Well, let's go ahead and take a look at that and see what kind of crazy ians dot. Vision. Let's see what kind of things people are. Selling out here? Yep. Markets unleashed. Let's go ahead and just connect a wallet just for giggles so that we can get in here some.

Pretty big sales on some of these right here and some pretty big offers, like 8.5 eath for 360 and an 8.5 eath offer for 205. I guess people like those those three digit numbers, it looks like, huh?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Last last year there was a big craze around three digits names this.

That's kind of a fun thing. You can get lost kind of in the old you can get lost down the rabbit hole here. Three letter, three letter ins. The top sale of all time went for 100 eath. That's at least in that particular three digit ones. That's kind of crazy. Some of these just grabbing your initials and then and then going, That's pretty crazy.

Right?

So let's talk a little bit about the benefits for businesses, for corporations and how they and and the people they serve benefit from having in us.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I think the the the marketplace and use cases for businesses are still developing but the direction that that I'm interested in is helping businesses with understanding customers, understanding consumers, KYC, KiB and and that type of thing. So one, I think businesses have the opportunity to use the subdomain function. So let's say you had bad crypto podcast and with your fan base, I'm sure you have some wild fans out there who would love to have a subdomain on

And so it looks to me like the domain you get the domain, you can register it for one year all the way up to ten years. And it looks to me like it's way more intelligent to go ahead and book it for more years because of the gas fees that are involved. It looks like it's it's relatively inexpensive to to to register a domain name for a year or ten years. You just you just got to pay gas fees in there. So might as well get it.

Yep. So as a name is about to expire, you'll see notifications in the manager app and we've recently started to give give users an opportunity to get notified so that their domains don't expire and you lose your your identity and your in your ins and.

Email or something. Is there an email notification?

Yes. Yes. So we just started working with with Fi and there's. There's a notification process process now and there's there's typically a waiting period. So your name will expire. And there's. It goes into this auction period where it starts high and and then and then goes low. And then you can bid on names after that. But yeah, there's definitely lots of notification and a grace period. So your names don't just go to auction at once as soon as it expires.

Interesting. Yeah. So what do you what do you make of the current state of the market here? Timestamp This is the June 27th, 2023, with these Bitcoin ETFs being proposed by BlackRock. Do you think that the the surge is going to come early or is this just a head fake preparing us for the bull run next year?

You know, I hate the.

Personal opinion, not financial.

Advice.

Not financial advice, not a financial product. But I think it's a it's a good signal and an interesting signal for the longevity of of crypto and web3 that these major institutions are starting to take steps to get, you know, to get into the to get into the game things. A very strong signal in terms of timing as to as to when things will actually pop off and blow up. I have no idea. But it's.

Coming.

It's coming. And this is definitely a great sign. So keep your eyes peeled.

You can feel the pressure.

Yeah.

You know what's also cool on these, Joel, is that you can also use emojis, it looks like. So I have a wizard and then the star emoji with the, you know, the three little stars dot eth with.

How do you how do you communicate that to somebody? Okay, what's where do I send this message?

Me It's Wizard Stars. Dot Yeah, Wizard stars.

Dot Yeah, There's a.

I actually just wanted to see if I can do it. I did. It cost much, but it was kind of funny. I think I was doing it for an ancient wisdom, the Wizard project. And there you go. You got the little have that and that. It's kind of fun.

There's a company who does that too. That that's all they do is the OG. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why not?

80 my 18. Yeah.

Yeah.

Are they using your tech to do that?

No, it's their, it's their own tech that, that they're using. Yeah. They're not on the protocol.

Got it.

So it's pretty interesting. So is there anything else about NS that maybe folks should know that maybe they don't know that you want to want to communicate out there to them?

Yeah.

Yeah, sure. So one of the unique things about NS is that it's governed by a Dao. I don't know if you've talked about Daos in in your community or on this podcast, but once or twice. All right. Yeah. So all of the registration fees go to the Dao that oversees the protocol, right? Manages the protocol. So there is a, an ecosystem working group and a public goods working group. And these two groups, they try to support projects that are building on ins and projects that serve

You know, the only one that I could think of, that's some form of competition. And I know that you guys are different in what you're trying to accomplish is unstoppable domains, right? Where they're decentralizing the the DNS system and in a different way. How do you guys view them and what are you doing or what are they doing that's different from what you're doing?

Yeah.

So they're another, another web3 domain project. And as you've seen, they have multiple, multiple domains. While we're just focused on dot ETH and then importing other DNS names, you can also see them reaching out to brands as well. So it seems like they're reaching out to brands and trying to create web3 domains for for them to. So it's just another, another product, another service that people can use in Web3.

Solar. Travis, last question is to you good, sir.

I have no other questions. I just think that it's an interesting process. And I think that, you know, if you're you're you're in crypto and, you know, you want to transfer things easily, having an NS domain name, a eath makes a whole lot of sense. It makes a makes it a whole lot easier for somebody to try to send you crypto because, I mean, even you're trying to copy that whole long address and oh, you messed

Yeah, you bet. You bet.

Yeah. You guys can go right over to Ian's domains. This is not paid placement. This is where we use the product. We're interested in it. You go start right here and type in, you know your name. Your name might be John Smith. And then you're going to find out that, oh, John Smith already owns that, but it expires September 20th, 2025. So, you know, put a notification on your your device and maybe you end up sniping it from John.

Well, you do say that it goes into an auction. So like typically, how high is the auction when it starts like eath or how big is he? How big does the the auction even go?

Yeah, I'm not sure how.

That's I'm curious. Now that's spurred another question. It's like, oh, it expires on this day and I want it And then then really it's sort of like a Dutch auction I guess where the high price and it gets lower and lower.

Lower And then yeah, the it depends on whether it's like a three digit name, a four digit name, five digit name. So it varies depending on the name length, too.

Gotcha. Corey, appreciate you coming on today. Thanks for sharing with us, man.

All right.

Thank you, guys. All the best.

Thank you.

So offline with Corey, we took a look at why the bad crypto address was under my ownership but under different management. And we figured out together how to do that. And we actually we determined that they've got an interface issue because you have to go into your, your, your more tab and under ownership, you have to click the send button and it's like send, manage, send the domain to a different manager or different owner. And so we

You're welcome. Yeah. Making things mo better. That's one of the things that we do. It's one of our. One of our great skills is optimizing just a weird process. So if you do go buy something on a secondary market, we've got your domain. You want it. They might still be the manager, you'll be the owner, They might still be the manager. She got on and fix that. But other than that, I've never had to do that. I've

Send your crypto to your mom.

Dot e your mom dot eath donation. That'd be a pretty funny one.

Clearly. Yeah. Send crypto to to your mom. Daddy.

Mom. Daddy. Yeah.

Hey everybody. Thanks for for joining us. We hope, of course, that you're checking out our other programs as well. Web three show, the Nifty show and the Bad Eye Show. We are here for you exploring and going to new places in the world of technology, bringing it to you because we dig this stuff. It's fun. Yeah.

And if you go on YouTube, you'll see there's some I'm creating some new shorts. I got some a new style of video. It's a vertical type video. We'll do a little quick minute thing about what's going on in the news. So we're not always doing news podcast, but every once in a while there's something that pops up that's interesting related to news. I'm doing shorts on Cryptos, YouTube, and then also the Web3 shows YouTube channel. So if you want to go check those out, do that. If not,

Yeah, we do. You don't want.

To mute yourself. You don't have to Yourself or not be yourself and say.

Words be muted. It's okay. Hey, thanks to everybody. We appreciate you. We'll catch you on the next episode. Until then, you know what to do. But I'm going to say it anyway. Even though you know what to do, I'm going to say it anyway. You ready? You ready? I can't hear you. I'm ready. I think they're ready. Okay. Ready?

Stay back. Stay back. Stay back.

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