One of the more common complaints about AENS is the rather short expiration time. In the current (LIMA) protocol version a name expire after a maximum of 50000 blocks. This is just a hair over 100 days - which it seems that many users find (far) too short. This has previously been discussed here, here, here and also here.
From a technical perspective it is quite easy to change, after all it is just a number BUT it is a number in the consensus protocol, thus we need a hard-fork/protocol upgrade to change it. I believe this is a perfect opportunity to test out community governance, and I think we should have a vote about the name expiration time.
But instead of just throwing out a vote in the governance voting aepp, let us first briefly discuss the alternatives here. I think reasonable alternatives for a vote could be: 1. keep it as is, 2. make it ~6 months, 3. make it ~12 months, and 4. make it ~24 months; but let’s hear it from you?!
The work to implement the change has been approved by the Æternity Crypto Foundation, this can be done ahead of time with just filling in the voted time at the end. Still, let’s aim to get the vote started in a week or so.
I think it is reasonable to bump it to 12 months. It will match mental model of DNS names handling.
The only reason it is 100 days, is that we realize it weeks/days before the last hard fork and we didn’t want to introduce any additional risks. Also, it was not blocking issues, as we thought that at not distant future there will be market for cheap automation to do it in contracts.
All in all, I totally support catching the hard fork train and extending it.
I fully support this. I think having it as it is requires reteaching the users to the current model which is rather unnecessary. Having it the same as DNSs would improve user experience.
thanks for bringing this topic up again! as already mentioned several times we plan to introduce some cool features around that with the relaunch of aenalytics.
anyway, to provide the really useful stuff we also need a hardfork that introduces the extended AENS interface. is this already merged @hanssv.chain? I gave up on that when I heard that we need to wait for hyperchains to be released before performing another hardfork.
I also agree to extend the name period to 12 months
The extended AENS interface for FATE (in Sophia) is merged since long, the crux is, as you mention, that we need a protocol upgrade (a.k.a hard-fork) to activate it. Some progress is being made, but it isn’t happening this week
OK, that was easy enough, everyone so far seems to think that 12 months is a good expiry time.
I’ll go ahead and create a vote - in the meantime we can keep the discussion going here.
The vote is now public, from here on we will refer to this vote as #36 ("The essence the numerology number 36 represents energies that accomplishes creative goals for helping humankind. ")
I would love for the base aepp or super hero to tell me the approximate expiry date of the name. I have to go back and forth and do some math to calculate when it will expire. I also like the 12 month period.
Yeah I see a button to autoextend, but how do you it does not show the time before it expires, nor do I see that it does anything else than just ticking a box O_O
I would also be interested in how you are achieving that @bruteforce.chain and I currently do not see the checkbox in my superhero wallet with version 0.3.2.
is the autoextend a backend feature on your side handled via smart contract interaction or does autoextend need the user to be online in order to trigger the autoextend shortly before it expires?
The checkbox allows you to mark all the names you want to be automatically extended when possible (automatically checks every name if it’s possible to extend), on every open of the wallet.
@marco.chain The exact behavior of the this feature is the following:
marked names are saved in the state of the wallet for auto-extend
on every wallet open
check if possible to extend the name (via the sdk)
preapare a nameUpdate transaction and ask for confirmation from the user
All of this is non custodial and bound to the specific wallet instance you are using. The marked names are only auto-extending if you do not reset your wallet’s state - otherwise you need to mark those again.
To be honest I dislike the whole process of AENS name registration. I tend to say that another strategic choice has to be made and that’s: Either the auction system has to go or names should be registered indefinite instead of for a particular time.
My objections to the auction system:
The duration of the auctions is way too long, you can’t seriously expect parties to wait for and x amount of days or weeks to get their name registered
The whole idea of auction seems to have been introduced against name squatting, but in reality it’s not much of a protection against this, it only drives the price up
Even if it would be effective against name squatting it opens up a potential other form of abuse, which is IMHO even worse than squatting: The possibility to drive up the price through bidding wars.
So once someone went through the ridiculous of auction, a name expires and the whole circus starts again. When you make people go to such a tiresome process just to register a name, I don’t think that even a term of a year is reasonable.
BUT it is a number in the consensus protocol, thus we need a hard-fork/protocol upgrade to change it. I believe this is a perfect opportunity to test out community governance, and I think we should have a vote about the name expiration time.
