v0.1 beta of the DNS can be something as simple as a taskbar widget that someone clicks, enters in a URL, it does a p2p query for the latest IP address for that site, and then displays an HTML link that the user clicks.
This way, you don't have to have any browser extensions.
You don't have to bind yourself to the dns resolver or network interface
This allows site names to map to ever changing IP addresses, from a p2p database. It's a very "lite" client, that doesn't need a huge download.
Microsoft never shipped with utorrent or ICQ, but look how popular those were. A little taskbar widget for Windows could really work.
v1 could be a browser plugin
v2 could be something that binds to the network interface almost like hotspot shield does..
By the way, if you expect the client to have to process regular BTS blocks, with all the other non-DNS traffic, I highly recommend against that. You need this to be as lean and mean as possible, as a separate dedicated sidechain.
If you're worried about getting BTS to gain benefit from this, all you have to do is make registering names happen via BTS only.
But clients need to do minimal processing in order to resolve a name. Right now, you type in a name and in milliseconds you get your answer from the root servers with only a less than 1 kb of traffic in either direction.
That's going to be the hard part. Designing a dedicated blockchain that hardly ever hard forks that is simple and quick, and stores very little resources on the client so it can work on phones and other small devices.
I love your idea!
A DNS database is just that. It's a lookup service, just like utorrent as you mentioned. So, if we go with .p2p, .dac, whatever, we just need to distribute that file to nodes that would like to host it, right?
It's essentially becoming its own blockchain, which at a later date could be chained into the BitShares blockchain or any other dapp that wants to make use of it.
As you mentioned above, registration would happen the BTS way. TITAN is a great example of this, only one person can have a specific user/account name.
Since I have already registered username kencode then I guess this means that kencode.p2p is mine already. I had to pay some BTS to get it, not much, but it was something.
Squatting: This is the tough one. Make the domain more expensive? Require votes from the community via your "delegate business plan" for use of that domain? This leads back to my idea at the top for this. The delegate name is the "web" hostname in a sense. A 0% payrate, but must be voted on nonetheless. Keybase.io has an interesting "proof of use" model for this too. The more links to other social/web accounts you own, the better.
The lite client you mention is awesome, we could start out with that, no gui really, just a tiny popup, like icq.
I'd be willing to run a full node of course to assist resolutions.
So, now we just need a coder to make the little icq-style popup app, and we need to clarify the squatter issue..............