Brave Browser Now Supports dot Crypto Domains. Rejoice!
I let my dot com website domain expire in August. My dot crypto domain has officially taken the baton.
Back in July I wrote a post called The Illusion of Ownership. The main point of that article was to explain my fundamental misunderstanding of “domain ownership” back in January of 2021 when I started to become concerned with the widespread de-platforming. In Illusion I wrote:
Faybomb.com is the domain that I have been operating for 23.5 months. Why do I know that figure so precisely? Because the domain needs to be renewed in early August or it will cease to exist. You see, even though I created and operate the domain name “faybomb.com,” I don’t actually own it. I rent it. So despite my best efforts I’m essentially renting my platform, not owning it. The Web 2 domain is a bit like a house without a mortgage if the owner doesn’t pay property taxes.
The main problem with paying the vig to renew that domain was that the expense to keep it running was cost-prohibitive. Since I have transitioned my focus to growing my research and content businesses on Substack and Seeking Alpha, the website was only really serving a vanity purpose. Operating the domain was cashflow positive for the first 23.5 months. It would have been cashflow negative if I had renewed it and paid for essential services like email and payment processing plugins. Two things I viewed as pointless since I was already getting both through Substack and Stripe.
On the surface, it may seem like my “own your platform” mantra has been a farce. But I can tell you now, the opposite couldn’t be more true. This has been a big week for platform ownership in my eyes. On Tuesday, Bluehost let me know they’re super serious about dumping my c panel since I haven’t renewed:
The c panel is where all of my files were stored. Pictures, videos, audio, the text of the posts. That's where all of that lived. Now, this is a form email so Bluehost doesn’t realize that there is already nothing on my c panel because I deleted it all myself in August. But that’s not really important. What matters is what my escape valve has been; my dot crypto domain.
I own and control faybomb.crypto. I purchased that domain through Unstoppable Domains for $40. It lives on the Ethereum blockchain. As long as Ethereum continues as a decentralized blockchain, I will have total control over that NFT domain. No renewals. No carry cost. I can route decentralized payments, build an IPFS website, and receive emails while keeping my email address private by using faybomb.crypto essentially as my digital identity.
Yesterday, we received some awesome news:
This means if you are a Brave Browser user, you can simply type “faybomb.crypto” into the URL like any standard HTTP readable dot com address and you’ll be able to see my new IPFS webpage in your HTTP browser. If you’re a Brave user, try it out and see for yourself. You may have to enable Infura first (it’ll prompt you). If you don’t have Brave (you should consider it), you can still access the page through IPFS by clicking here.
This is a cool moment. Is it a complex webpage? No. But it doesn’t need to be. It’s a proof of concept. We don’t need to rent domains or hosting servers in perpetuity when we can store our files and pages on IPFS and route traffic to them through blockchain-based domains that don’t require renewals. I have a funny feeling this public blockchain thing isn’t going anywhere…
One final point; Brave is quickly becoming one of the most exciting companies in Web 3. You can access IPFS webpages through dot crypto domains and use those same dot crypto domains in Brave’s wallet to route ETH and SOL payments.
Here’s Brave’s native browser wallet, I can just type “faybomb.crypto” into the receiver address and it auto-routes to the correct 0x address. The non-human readable 0x address has been a major pain point in the crypto p2p UI. This is getting really cool, guys.
Where can I go to figure out crypto? Thanks Mike!