To everyone has contributed in this thread—thank you for helping to move progress on BNS forward!
Jeff and I have been chatting with a few of you and reflecting on these challenges. We’ve also been studying ENS, HNS, and Unstoppable and thinking about the future of decentralized identity—especially in connection to Bitcoin. With that said, we’re happy to announce that we’re heads-down building a protocol to upgrade BNS without requiring a hard fork.
Funny enough, Jeff and I first worked on BNS over 4 years ago, back when it was the “Blockstack Naming System”. We share the view that on-chain naming systems are a core part of a decentralized future. Today we’re letting the community know that we’re picking up the BNS torch again. We want to join with the rest of the community to move continue to improve BNS.
We’ve been trying to figure out the right way to do this. A separate hard-fork right now is way too messy, and it would impede shipping clear improvements in the short term. Instead, we’ve designed a system that starts out as a soft fork and allows users to opt-in and opt-out. We think this design is the right first step so we can improve BNS quickly and with little friction. In the long run, if this new system is successful and what the community wants, then it can be adopted as the “official” BNS.
We’ll share more details soon but wanted to highlight some key benefits we will include in our first release:
- A single address can own multiple names while having a “primary name” to keep things consistent
- SIP9 compliance for out-of-the-box wallet and marketplace compatibility
- A wrapping mechanism that will ensure backwards compatibility with BNS
If you want to follow our progress, follow and reach out at @mechanismhq, @heynky and @stackatron.