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In the past few months there has been a lot of chatter about `web3` and what it means and doesn't mean for the future of the web. There's a lot of hype around NFTs, mostly because of the money that is exchanging hands, and instead of outright dismissing it I wanted to dive deeper to understand it better.
I first thought about NFTs when I discovered you can buy ENS Domains[1] and then set them up like a standard DNS name with the additional benefit of using them as an identity. I went through the ENS purchase - setting up Coinbase Wallet[2] - and buying the domain with some ETH. My overall impression was is there's a lot of fees. Registering the domain and other actions are relatively inexpensive, but the gas fees[3] are much higher and take up the bulk of the transaction cost. Skipping over all the details, it cost about 400$ to fully setup `ecliptik.eth` - registering, reverse lookup to my wallet address, and setting the metadata.
The results of setting up the ENS domain are here, ecliptik.eth[4] and it resolves to https://ecliptik.eth[5] on IPFS. This name also includes additional features like setting my Avatar image to an NFT I own[6] (which is one I created myself and put on opensea.io[7] for free).
The next domain setup was Handshake[8] which is a "Decentralized naming and certificate authority" and has an auction process to acquire a Handshake domain. I setup Bob Wallet[9] and went through the airdrop claim[10] to get some HNS. Eventually I ended up using Namebase[11] to handle the auction and management details and after about 14 days (due to the auction process) I was the new owner of the `ecliptik` Handshake domain.
The one interesting thing I noticed is that the `ecliptik` domain was already up for auction when I checked. After some research I found that if you register an ENS domain name and it's not claimed on Handshake, there are bots that will automatically start and auction for it. Because it was a bot and not someone else trying to buy it, I easily outbid and acquired the name with no counter bids. I also acquired a few other names like `amfora` and `rawtext` since I had some more HNS.
Accessing the HNS domain requires some additional software or using DNS servers that support it, the Namebase article How to Access Handshake Sites[12] has how to set this all up.
Now that I had the DNS and Handshake domains I had to figure out how to use them. ENS has a lot of documentation on using IPFS[13] to point an ENS domain to, and then it's fully part of the "Distributed Web". After doing some research I found that Fleek.co[14] provides free Web, IPFS, ENS, and Handshake features. I followed their setup guide and now whenever I push to `main` on my Github Pages repo[15], it automatically publishes it to IPFS using InterPlanetary Name System (IPNS[16]) which resolves the name `ecliptik.ens` to the current version of this blog.
Now whenever I publish to this blog, it's automatically updated on IPFS and available at ipns://ecliptik.eth[17], and via http at https://ecliptik.eth.limo[18].
Accessing ENS and IPFS directly requires some additional software outside of traditional browsers, but Brave[19] has support both for ENS and IPFS.
Learning about ENS, Handshake, and IPFS was a lot of fun, and while I highly doubt that `web3` is "the future", these technologies have a lot of offer for the future of the Internet. I am particularly fond of IPFS as it reminds me of Bittorrent[20] but without having to setup a torrent/magnet link and seed. Getting started with IPFS is easy, and hosting your own IPFS node locally is a quick and free way to participate in the distributed web.
I really understood the power of IPFS when I saw the different ways you could use it as a Gateway[21], enabling any application that uses http to access content on IPFS. This really shines with git and package repositories, see OpenBSD 6.9 packages using IPFS[22] for a real-world application.
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