Where did the fee of creating the namespace .id go?

1H9KQTLi3EDezodiRRn8 · January 19, 2018, 2:39am

in the whitepaper, has this desc:
To start the first namespace on Blockstack, the .id namespace, we paid 40 bitcoins ($10,000 at the time) to the network.
This shows that even the developers of this decentralized system have to follow the rules and pay appropriate fees.

my question is:
where did the fee of creating the namespace .id go? who get it? the miner?

thank you.

vsund · January 19, 2018, 9:12am

Blockstack currently uses a burn address to pay Bitcoin back into the network. The address used is the one corresponding to the all-zero public key. You can see this in the code at

github.com

blockstack/blockstack-core/blob/6cd81a1ee855b3d4a37516a88d0fb12ab1160cf8/blockstack_client/constants.py#L288


LENGTH_CONSENSUS_HASH = 16
LENGTH_MAX_NAME = 37  # maximum name length
LENGTH_MAX_NAMESPACE_ID = 19  # maximum namespace length


# namespace version
NAMESPACE_VERSION_PAY_TO_BURN = 0x1
NAMESPACE_VERSION_PAY_TO_CREATOR = 0x2


NAME_SCHEME = MAGIC_BYTES + NAME_REGISTRATION


# burn address for fees (the address of public key
# 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000)
BLOCKSTACK_BURN_PUBKEY_HASH = '0000000000000000000000000000000000000000'
BLOCKSTACK_BURN_ADDRESS = virtualchain.hex_hash160_to_address(BLOCKSTACK_BURN_PUBKEY_HASH)   # '1111111111111111111114oLvT2'


# borrowed from Blockstack Core
# never changes, so safe to duplicate to avoid gratuitous imports
MAXIMUM_NAMES_PER_ADDRESS = 25


RPC_MAX_ZONEFILE_LEN = 4096     # 4KB
RPC_MAX_PROFILE_LEN = 1024000   # 1MB

1H9KQTLi3EDezodiRRn8 · January 19, 2018, 9:32am

You mean nobody gets it?

vsund · January 19, 2018, 11:34am

@larry had very good words for this:

Through burning Bitcoins (or making them inaccessible) you somehow make the other Bitcoins rarer. Furthermore these Bitcoins aren’t removed from the network, someone still could find the private key to the all-zero public key. (And if so, we could simply increment the public burn key.)