How to Get an Anonymous Website - The Sovereign Computing Show (SOV015)

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

In today's digital landscape, having your own website is more important than ever for true digital independence. Jordan Bravo and Stephen DeLorme explain how to register domain names and set up web hosting with minimal personal information and maximum privacy. They cover Bitcoin-accepting registrars, anonymous VPS providers, and how the domain name system really works. Plus, they discuss a controversial Bitcoin update proposal that highlights why running your own node matters.

Chapters

00:00 Why Own Websites Beat Social Media Platforms
00:35 Introduction and ATL BitLab Sponsorship
01:55 Welcome and Contact Information
02:26 News: Bitcoin Core Pull Request to Remove OP_Return Limits
07:29 Why This PR Highlights the Importance of Running Your Own Node
11:22 Main Topic: Private Domain Names and Hosting
12:35 Minimizing Personal Information When Registering Domains
13:29 NameCheap: Domain Registration with Bitcoin
15:57 Using Fake Information and Domain Privacy Guard
17:15 Domain Takedown Threat Model
20:18 DNSSEC for Enhanced Security
21:21 PorkBun: Another Private Domain Registrar
21:54 Private Hosting Options Introduction
22:54 Hostinger VPS Services
24:11 1984 Hosting in Iceland
24:46 Flokinet in Iceland
25:17 Why Personal Websites Matter in the Social Media Age
29:46 Websites vs. Censorship-prone Social Media Platforms
31:36 Avoiding Services Like LinkTree
35:01 Technical Side Discussion: How Domain Names Work
35:30 How ICANN, Registries, and Registrars Interoperate
40:14 How Authorities Can Take Down Domain Names
42:33 Trade-offs with Different TLDs (.com vs alternatives)
47:56 Boost Segment and Listener Appreciation

Transcript

Jordan Bravo: Welcome to The Sovereign Computing Show. I'm Jordan Bravo and I'm recording today from ATL Bitlab here in the [00:02:00] heart of Atlanta with Stephen DeLorme.

Stephen DeLorme: Sup.

Jordan Bravo: Before we get into our main topic today, we're going to talk about an ongoing news event. And this is about something that's occurring in Bitcoin, The Bitcoin Core repo has a pull request on it, which means somebody is trying to add a change to Bitcoin, and that would be in this case, Peter Todd, who is a well-known Bitcoin developer. And the name of this pull request is Remove arbitrary limit on OP_Return (data carrier) outputs. And what that [00:03:00] means is currently there's the OP_Return section of an output and there's a limit on it, and this proposes that, that limit be removed.

What is OP_Return? OP_Return is a section in a Bitcoin transaction that data can be put into arbitrary data, and it's not, it's not spendable. So it can be any kind of data. Typically, this is a message. For example, if you wanted to inscribe a message into a Bitcoin transaction, then you would put it in the OP_Return. And the reason this OP_Return standard, or, or, OP code was created was they wanted to give somewhere for somebody to put data unrelated to a transaction if they wanted to. And the justification was that people are going to do this anyway. A lot of people are, you, you might say Bitcoin monetary Maximalist would [00:04:00] say, the only reason to use Bitcoin to send a transaction is to actually move value from one address to another. But you have other people that want to use it to send arbitrary data, like putting messages onto the Bitcoin blockchain, putting JPEGs or anything else, any kind of other data unrelated to the transaction. And so since people are doing that, the reasoning was might as well give them a place to do it, that the nodes don't have to keep that data around forever and therefore accumulate a bunch of data that's gonna bloat the storage requirements.

So at the time it was created, there was a limit put in place of how much data you could put in there. Now, this pull request is proposing to remove that limit. And my understanding for the reasoning behind it is that, people are currently already getting around this and they're putting it in the transactions themselves with things like [00:05:00] inscriptions and these can be huge. You make the transaction really large, and because it's in the witness data, the Bitcoin nodes have to keep this data around and it's just going to exponentially increase the storage requirements for a Bitcoin node.

And so by giving, by removing the limits on the OP_Return, you are giving them an alternative where they can put their inscriptions and their other kind of arbitrary data without putting it into the transaction itself. That has to be kept. So Stephen, did I nail that? Did I-

Stephen DeLorme: I think so.

Jordan Bravo: Flub it. Is there anything that I'm missing there?

Stephen DeLorme: Yeah, I think that's, that about covers it. Like a couple finer points. I'll go ahead and say, when opt turn was invented, people actually already were putting data on Bitcoin. I forget the name of the game or the project, whatever people were building. But it, it was like a kind of a problem that they were creating these unspendable outputs.

That was the idea that like the data they were storing on chain took the form of like, [00:06:00] outputs that were unsendable. And so that's why the OP_Return was made. It's like, well, let's go ahead and make an OP. You know, if people are already doing this, let's make a way for them to do it that's like obviously provably unspendable. And that way people who don't want to keep the data can just throw it away.

And you mentioned inscriptions also one thing that's mentioned in the discussion for this is the Citrea project and, you know, some kind of, you know, watchtower thing that they're putting in transaction outputs and its own spendable.

And so, another kind of like finer point getting into the Bitcoin weeds. I mean, this is a super, I, I actually think the PR itself is very simple in terms of what it changes, but the concept in discussing it is incredibly difficult, because I don't even think it's consensus rules that are changing it's standardness rules.

It's just like, it's, it's not even like changing anything about, uh, the consensus. It's, it's changing anything about like, whether, nodes will, add it to their mempool and broadcast it and share it with other nodes. And because it's so difficult to talk about, [00:07:00] I think that's the reason why there's actually been a lot of kind of stress, in the Bitcoin space over the past. I don't know, a week or so.

Jordan Bravo: Would you say this is a controversial PR?

Stephen DeLorme: I would say it's a controversial PR and in my personal opinion, I don't think it should be. But I, I can understand because it is such a complicated issue to talk about and it is nuance and look, every people have different opinions on this and really smart people disagree about this.

You know, if we've lost anybody, cause you know, there are some people listening to this who maybe are tuning in just to figure out how to be a little bit more private or, you know, to give up a little less more data. We did, you know, cover running Bitcoin nodes and lightning nodes on a previous episode. And I think the main takeaway from all of this, if you didn't understand any of the complicated, you know, technical discussion. The main idea is that this is a change to the Bitcoin software and kind of whether or not you agree with it or disagree with [00:08:00] it, unless you're running your own node, you don't really get to have a, a choice or a say in it. Like, you know, you can voice opinions and have discussion and all of that kind of stuff, but at the protocol layer for Bitcoin, uh, if you're not running your own node, you don't really get a say in this process here.

And so that's just another kind of angle to cyber computing I think sometimes we think about, uh, this stuff strictly as just like, well, my data and my privacy and all of that. But when you get into projects like, Bitcoin, and, and running your own Bitcoin node, that's actually kind of like what gives you a say, to some degree and the kinds of features and upgrades that Bitcoin undergoes.

Jordan Bravo: So let's say I'm running my own node, and just for the sake of argument, I do not agree with, let's pose a hypothetical. Let's say that this PR gets merged and becomes a part of the next version of Bitcoin Core. We are currently on Bitcoin Core 28.1. Let's say it becomes part of 28.2. I'm not [00:09:00] sure if that's actually gonna be the version when it comes out, but let's just say it is.

Stephen DeLorme: Mm-hmm.

Jordan Bravo: If I'm running my own node and I disagree with this decision and I do not want that limit to be removed on my node that I'm running, how would I prevent that?

Stephen DeLorme: That's pretty simple. You just wouldn't update to the latest version of Bitcoin Core. Simple as that. You just choose to remain on 28.1.

Jordan Bravo: And I think it's worth pointing out that for this exact type of reason, Bitcoin Core is designed to not auto update. In fact, you have to be pretty explicit about updating it, running the newest version, because when you run Bitcoin Core, you are telling the rest of the network, here's the set of rules that I agree to, that I agree that to be a part of and propagate transactions for. And so if you were to have auto updates on Bitcoin, that would be a [00:10:00] security vulnerability. That would actually be an attack vector where somebody could put in, uh, some kind of malicious update and then push it out to all the nodes that are auto updating. So it's by design supposed to be a somewhat manual process so that you can decide for yourself if you want to upgrade to the next version.

Stephen DeLorme: Yeah, and even assuming that there's, even assuming there was no security back doors or anything like that, it just feels kind of like in line with the Bitcoin ethos to that people should choose which node version they want to run because, you know, at the end of the day, on the, at the protocol level, the only true users are Bitcoin nodes. Those are the, the users of the Bitcoin protocol the nodes themselves.

Jordan Bravo: Right. And if you're not using your own Bitcoin node, then you're using somebody else's Bitcoin node and you don't have any control over that. Tell us what you think of this topic. Do you find this to be a controversial PR? If it gets merged and as part of Bitcoin, are you going to upgrade your node? [00:11:00] Are you going to stick with the current version? Do you think this takes away some of the sovereignty of node runners? Let us know, you can boost in and tell us with Fountain or another Podcasting 2.0 app, or you can email us at sovereign@atlbitlab.com.

For today's main topic, we're gonna talk about how to get a domain name as well as hosting in a private self-sovereign manner, or at least as self-sovereign as domain names can be. I think that we should talk about that particular issue with the domain name system.

The domain name system has a, it's inherently centralized because there's a list of domain name registrars and the ICANN, which is the International Corporation-

Stephen DeLorme: for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Jordan Bravo: Thank you. International Corporation for Assigned names and numbers, which is the international [00:12:00] body that regulates or, uh, partitions out domain names. And so ultimately there is a central point of failure when it comes to domain names. However, there's also a huge spectrum of completely sovereign, which doesn't technically exist, but pretty sovereign and private with domain names all the way to fully KYC and censrable and we're gonna talk about how we can get as far towards that self-sovereign spectrum as possible.

When you register for a domain name, they might ask for everything from your real name, address, phone number, bank account, payment information, all the way to the minimum amount possible, and that's really what we're searching for here. That minimum amount is going to be an email address so that you can simply have an account. And for that you can use an alias like simple login, which we've talked about in a previous episode, if you are [00:13:00] unfamiliar with that, check out our episode on email and email privacy, and you'll get a whole bunch of good information on how to get started with that. And for payment, you wanna look for something that accepts cryptocurrency and specifically Bitcoin. We're fans of Bitcoin here, although some of them are gonna accept Monero as well. And I would say that that's certainly a tool that can be used.

Two examples that I wanna talk about first for just straight domain name registration are Namecheap, that's namecheap.com. And uh, I've been using this one for a long time. NameCheap was one of the first providers to first registrars to accept Bitcoin and I have zero complaints about NameCheap, as the name implies. They are relatively cheap. I haven't seen anywhere that has better prices, so I think they have great prices.

And when I register with NameCheap, I use the minimum amount of information possible. So [00:14:00] the only thing that they have is my email address. Uh, of course, I create a password to log into my account. My email address is an alias, and then when I go to pay, I select Bitcoin. I simply top up my account balance with Bitcoin and then I can buy any of their products and services with it.

And one thing I'll note is that they used, uh, they used BTC pay server, so they're not using some third party KYC Coinbase, uh, Coinbase commerce type thing where it's, it's using cryptocurrency supposedly, but really it's kind of just like it's as bad as the legacy banking system in terms of tracking you and, and the data that you have to give up.

So this one I consider BTC pay server to be a legit sort of Bitcoin native way to, to pay for it. And they do indeed support that here.

Stephen DeLorme: I actually did not know that there were, like we were talking about before the show started, [00:15:00] I was not even aware that there were domain name registrars that don't KYC or not, I shouldn't say KYC, but they don't ask for lots of information. I, I guess I never considered it 'cause I'm usually, buying domains on a business context and you know, as a result I don't kind of worry about it as much, 'cause I kind of just feel like, okay, you know, business details are kind of doxed anyways. And so, especially if you're public about your business, so, I, I guess I never really thought about it. I, I just assumed this whole system had been fully captured.

Jordan Bravo: Well, it's, it's good to know that there's a way to do it in a much more private manner, and when you are filling out your information, you have to give out your name and address for the domain, like once you're within your NameCheap account,

Stephen DeLorme: Mm-hmm.

Jordan Bravo: I am not telling you to break any kind of laws, but nobody is going to blink twice if you put in [00:16:00] fake information in there. So the, the name and address and all of that, just use a, uh, user generator website. Just look those up and you get a, a nice randomized name, address, and phone number.

And then in addition to that, you want to utilize domain privacy guard NameCheap offers that for free. Many registrars also offer that as well, what that does is it offers you a layer of privacy between the public and that that name, that information that you gave. Now, even though that you're putting in the fake information, it's still nice to have it so that if somebody is pinging your website from the public, they can't really glean, it'll just say domain by some privacy company, privacy guard or something like that. So that, that's what gives you a layer of privacy from the public and then from the domain name registrar itself, that fake information that you're putting in there and lack of a payment information is going to protect you from the registrar [00:17:00] themselves, so that even if they were co-opted or forced to via court order, they would know nothing about you and they couldn't give you a, as far as censorship,

yes. There is an ultimately a way where a law enforcement organization could go to the domain name registrar and if they had a court order, I'm not even sure what that process would look like. Maybe we can war game this out. You know how, let's say some government agency wanted to censor a website and they were registered with very private details, how would they take them down?

Stephen DeLorme: Well, I mean, I think the simplest solution is if, I mean, if the domain name is registered with private details, if, if, if they want the website to go down, then that would just be as simple as I, I think just do they have a legally binding way to order, order the registrar to kind of halt that user's account. Like if the root name servers take down [00:18:00] the like a record and all the other like DNS records, then the other DNS servers around the world, you know, their the records will eventually expire on their servers. 'cause they all have a time to live. They won't be able to refresh their DNS records from the root name server.

Uh, so that's how I would see it happening, being the web server, like whatever, web server, uh, in question could, could still be running, and that doesn't really change or affect that in any way. But, if you just attack the root domain name, I think that's a, a pretty quick way to make the website not work for 99% of people.

Jordan Bravo: Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but there's two different areas that could be attacked. There's the name server.

Stephen DeLorme: Mm-hmm.

Jordan Bravo: Which is where you have a decentralized system of name servers all around the internet and those tell, those tell users or anybody that's trying to reach the website, what IP address to, to point to.

Stephen DeLorme: Yep.

Jordan Bravo: Then you have the registrar [00:19:00] itself, which says, this account is, has registered this domain name and therefore whatever settings they've put in their dashboard, what whatever IP address they're pointing at, that's what we're gonna honor.

Stephen DeLorme: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the registrars are just kind of like, you know, businesses that, able to, you know, sell particular domain names to users.

But you have the, like, the root name servers that actually like, handle, like, which, uh, 'cause you've got the name servers for any given domain name, right? So like for atlbitlab.com, you can do a lookup, you can figure out what the name servers are and the name servers host those DNS records.

Um, those are like the, the, like a, the authoritative place where the IP addresses, for, you know, that website can be found. And, but how do you find those name servers? Well, you have to get that information from the root name server. That's my understanding of it at [00:20:00] least.

So yeah, you would, you would basically, you would either want to, I guess, attack the name servers themselves, or you'd have to tell the root name server to like, you know, stop pointing to those name servers. But I'm not sure.

Jordan Bravo: I wanted to mention a feature that many domain name registrars, including NameCheap support and that is DNS sec. That's D-N-S-S-E-C. And that stands for DNS Security something something.

Stephen D's screen: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jordan Bravo: But it's basically what this does is it prevents another kind of attack, which is a, a domain, a name server, spoofing, or any kind of name, server interruption or attack. Now, we've seen this before where organizations would go after domain name, resolvers and name servers and put in different information so that even though a website was still up and running, people, users could not get to it because they would type in the domain name and it would point to a different [00:21:00] server. And so you can actually mitigate that by ensuring you have DNS SEC enabled on your domain name.

Stephen DeLorme: That's really cool. I was looking for like a knowledge based thing, but about it. But I think that's great. DNS SEC is awesome. An advocate for it and I did not know Namecheap supported it, so that's really cool.

Jordan Bravo: Before we move on to hosting, which is a little bit of a different topic then domain names themselves. I wanted to shout out to a registrar called Porkbun. I have not personally used this one, but I've heard that they also support, um, anonymous registration and they accept Bitcoin as well.

Stephen DeLorme: This is the website right here?

Jordan Bravo: Yep.

Stephen DeLorme: They have pigs all over their website.

Jordan Bravo: porkbun.com

Stephen DeLorme: Yeah. Nice.

Jordan Bravo: Let's move into hosting now, which is slightly different than the domain name itself. Hosting is a server where your website or application is [00:22:00] actually gonna run, and so your domain name and your hosting do not have to be on the same site, in fact, it's kind of nice to have them decouple and beyond different services. However, this next hosting provider that I'm gonna talk about offers both hosting and domain names. In fact, a lot of service providers offer both because they wanna make it convenient, like a one stop shop. You know, if I am, if I'm not super technical and I wanna make a website for my church or my, you know, my club or my home crafting shop, I might go to a single site and I want them to give me a domain name, host my website and even build the website for me. So there's, there's all in one providers, but I always think it's, it's a good idea to have them separated out.

However, this one that I'm recommending is a great provider. They're called Hostinger and it's hostinger.com is the domain name. And I [00:23:00] am currently using this for a VPS that I have.

A VPS is a Virtual Private Server. And this is basically your own Linux server in the cloud. And you can do pretty much anything with a VPS from hosting a full on application to a simple personal website. And what I like about Hostinger is that again, they, they require only the minimal amount of information, just an email address, which you can use an alias for, and then you can pay in Bitcoin. And so I have a VPS that's running for a reverse proxy for all of my personal services. And I've, um, as far as Hostinger knows I'm just an account number. One thing you wanna be aware of when you're connecting to your VPS provider is to you make sure your VPN is enabled, that way you are obscuring your home IP address. And you can check out our previous Sovereign computing episode on VPNs for more [00:24:00] details on that.

Stephen DeLorme: Hmm. Never heard of this. That's cool. Nice looking website.

Jordan Bravo: Another hosting provider that gives, that has VPSs that you can pay in Bitcoin and stay anonymous is 1984.hosting. They're located in Iceland, which is famous for their privacy and digital sovereignty. They accept both Bitcoin and Monero. And again, they have, uh, good prices and minimal amount of information required.

Stephen DeLorme: Yeah, they're flying their Bitcoin and Monero flags, uh, pretty, uh, proudly on their homepage.

Jordan Bravo: I love that. The last one I wanna give a mention to is FlokiNET. This is another Iceland service provider. And they have pretty cheap 3.50 euros a month is, is a great price in my opinion. Uh, they also have VPSs and [00:25:00] other types of hosting, and again, they will collect the minimum amount, amount of data, which is just an email address and they allow you to pay in Bitcoin.

Stephen DeLorme: Hmm. That's cool.

Jordan Bravo: We talked about hosting providers, and we talked about domain name providers. Is there anything else you can think of when it comes to getting a website up and running? Maybe we could talk about reasons you would want to even do that in the first place, servers, et cetera.

Stephen DeLorme: Well, I mean. That's actually a good question in the modern age because I think a lot of the narrative publicly has just shifted the social media, and a lot of times. I think websites are great. I think having a homepage is great. I think it's kind of like your static fixed place on the internet. It's really nice if you have your personal website and even if you don't have like a [00:26:00] product or a business or something professional you want to do with it, it's kind of fun that you get to have your personal site, that is, is kind of constructed the way you like it to be. And I think we kinda lost that magic a little bit. That was like a fun thing in the nineties and early two thousands to be able to like have your personal homepage and even if it was, you know, it could be, you know, there are people who may like, this is my shrine to whatever, Dragon Ball Z character or page. And then, you know, you'd have other people just like, you know, here's some of my favorite bands and my favorite books. And it's like, I, I, I don't know. That all feels very quaint now, but there was something kind of magical about that, that everybody had their little home on the internet and, I think, you know, I kind of wish, uh, that we'd bring some more of that back.

A lot of people have, just pivoted to social media, which is fine, but it's something different, social media, and you don't really control it. And there's nothing really that feels fixed and permanent about it. And [00:27:00] there's of course attempts like, you know, Nostr and stuff like that to try and decentralize that, but I think there's something kind of beautiful, which is about having your own website. Then having said that, there's also you know what, if you want to run your own business or run a website for, you know, your, your club, your church, your company, whatever it is, so these are good skills to be able to have.

You know, as always, I think it's just nice to be kind of liberated from the big service providers. A lot of times when you get onto, plans with like a software company, uh, a lot of your decision making, I think revolves around like, what plan do I need to be on and like, how many transactions or how many pages do I get, or how many products can I add to this store? And a lot of times when, uh, you're able to, you know, host your own website, you don't have that kind of concern, like for example of like, uh, I see on, uh, you know, uh, was it, did they mention on this, on Floki? [00:28:00] Yeah. Like, okay. I don't know about this one, but one of 'em mentioned WordPress, right? So like 1984 it mentioned that hosting mentions WordPress on their page. And if you want to go and sell something online and you go to like big cartel or, Shopify or whatever other website you're gonna be like, it's gonna be like, well, $30 a month minimum for your store or this percent in transaction fees or like, you can list up 10 products on the free plan. Right. I'm not saying that's exactly what their business model is. I've just, I've seen that a lot of times with e-commerce hosting providers. Uh, it's a very common thing. And I think that factors into your decision making, whereas if you just like went to one of these webs hosts, deployed a WordPress store, set up WooCommerce, you could get a proof of concept website up and running very quickly, and hook that up to like a free stripe account for credit cards or like pointed to your BTC Pay server for Bitcoin.

[00:29:00] And then you have maximum freedom, cause you're, you're in the, like, WordPress open source ecosystem and it gets a lot of, you know, shade thrown at it these days. But it has a huge, powerful plugin ecosystem. Like, there's a lot that you can do that, if you want to try and do with platforms like Webflow and all these other centralized platforms, you just have to pay an arm and a leg for a lot of the, the basic features and stuff. So, I don't know. That was kind of a rant, but I just, you know, I think there's something beautiful about personal websites that I wish we would bring back. And I also think that, you know, you have maximum amount of freedom, when you think about hosting your own website.

Jordan Bravo: Agreed on all of those points and sort of building on top of that with social media, you are renting an account on somebody else's server, and you're playing by their rules. And we've seen how in the past few years, especially how easy it is for people to get censored on social [00:30:00] media basically if, if they decide they don't like what you're saying, then your account can be shut off instantly.

When you have your own website, while we talked about, it's because of the domain name system is ultimately centralized. It is a much higher barrier or a, a much higher bar to meet for a domain name to be shut down than it is for a social media account to be deactivated. So in order for it, it's very rare that you would know anybody that's actually had a website uh, domain name taken down by some federal authorities, right? Like they, they often have to go to, they have to go to a federal level, and sometimes even an international level, depending on the registrar, or the registry. And this is like, in order for them to disrupt a registrar's business like that, they have to have a legit cause. Typically, if you're just saying some mean stuff on your website or something [00:31:00] that the, uh, other people disagree with, they're not gonna be able to get your website shut down from the domain name level. So this is a much higher level of self sovereignty and ownership over your whole stack. So you have the lower censorship, you also have the greater permanence, as you mentioned, you can have your website around forever, whereas social media comes and goes. And then you'll have something convenient. Like there's actually, have you, have you heard about LinkTree, Stephen?

Stephen DeLorme: I know. Yes, I have.

Jordan Bravo: Yeah. So LinkTree is, it's kind of fun to laugh at the fact that this site is so popular, but LinkTree is just a website that you can list your various links. So it's like, oh, I, I have, here's my, my Twitter and my Instagram and my Facebook, blah, blah, blah, and, and just to find all of that, go to LinkTree so you only have to remember one thing. Well, if you have your own website, you don't need a LinkTree. You know, I could have Jordan bravo.com and I could say, go to jordanbravo.com to [00:32:00] contact me and it'll have my email address and all the other ways that you can contact me. Whereas, if I didn't have my own website, I would say go to LinkTree and then search for Jordan Bravo and, oh, shoot, somebody else already claimed that, so here's a one after my name. And you know, it's just, it's much less professional and you, you absolutely do not own it in any way, shape, or form.

Stephen DeLorme: Yeah. LinkTree is like, wow. I mean like, maybe this is like a side tangent, but I, as someone who's grown up with the web. It is like infuriating to me to see like not infuriating, just frustrating. I don't, I don't always understand it. These experiences that like limit what we can do but become so popular and so like Instagram is one of those, it's like I see artists and photographers and you know, any kind of content creator basically like conforming to the you know, squareish aspect [00:33:00] ratio of Instagram because, you know, well it has to fit on Instagram and like arranging things so that they're spaced out and look a certain way and your feed. So it's like their work is now being dictated by the feed on Instagram versus with a website, you have this whole canvas to work with and you can arrange things however you want.

And it's the same with LinkTree. It's like, if you want to have a personal homepage, like that's what this is, this is like your home on the web. It's like your personal homepage. Here's all of the stuff that I'm involved in, but all it is is a page with like three or four links on it, and it's like, so this is something like people pay for this. Like people pay for a service that lets you make what at its core is essentially just an HTML file with three links in it.

I mean, I'm, I get it, like I'm, we're looking at the page here. There's like some pretty stuff you can style it for your, you know, unique Gen Z personality. Okay, I get that. But like, it's just weird, the [00:34:00] fact that we're paying like all this money just for a page with like a couple of links on it. Like, that's like how just like centralized the web has become and it's weird.

Jordan Bravo: I agree. I appreciate the rant. That's kind of what I was alluding to and I'm glad you said it the way you said it. One last thing I I'd point out when you have your own domain name is we talked about the, in the episode on email addresses, how to decouple your email address and really take ownership and sovereignty over that. And in order to do that, you really need your own domain name. And so by having your own domain name, you have the power to have your own website. You have the power to have your own email address with an infinite number of, of, email names at that address, inboxes you could say. So it really gives you, it kind of makes you a, a citizen of the internet rather than a surf of the internet.

Stephen DeLorme: Sounds good to me.

Jordan Bravo: Jordan and I got off on a side [00:35:00] tangent that we think that many of you are going to find very interesting especially if you're curious about how this technology works, curious about failure scenarios with domain names and, and, and all of that. Um, but we've moved it to the end of the conversation so that we were able to get through all of the product suggestions and all that at the beginning. So if you're interested to really, really dive deep. And get into some interesting territory. Keep listening.

I, I think it's worth talking this through a little bit because the way that the domain name system works. I'm actually asking this now because I've never thought about this exact

Stephen DeLorme: Mm-hmm.

Jordan Bravo: Part of it, which is how does ICANN a portion domain names to registrars, and then how is control or ownership of it transferred. For example, to a registrar and then from a registrar to a user.

Stephen DeLorme: I don't know. Should we ask Maple?

Jordan Bravo: I, I think we could do that. [00:36:00] And we, we may or may not wanna edit this

Stephen DeLorme: Yeah. Into me how, uh, ICANN, um, and registrars, uh, interoperate, uh, for example, if a registrar a, um, provisions. Um, example.com to Alice. Um, how, uh, does, um, uh, how does registrar, I can't type right now, how does at Registrar B, um, uh. How do we prevent red, just straw b from also provisioning, um, example.com to Bob.[00:37:00]

And this is also like a Llama model that I think doesn't have access to the open internet, but this is also like knowledge that's been around for a while, so it wouldn't surprise me if it's been around. So ICANN registers interoperate through system that ensures uniqueness of domain name registrations across different registrars.

Here's a simplified overview of the process. ICANN is responsible for managing the global domain name system and ensuring that each domain name is unique. ICANN maintains a centralized database known as the Root Zone, which contains the authoritative records for all top level domains such as .com, dot org, dot net registries. For each TLD, there is a corresponding registry that manages the domain name registrations within that TLD. For example, Verisign is the registry for .com and.net. Registries are responsible for maintaining the authoritative database for their respective TLDs.

Registrars, registrars such as registrar A and B are accredited by ICANN to sell domain name registrations to customers like Alice and Bob. Registrars [00:38:00] interact with the registries to provision and manage domain name registrations to prevent duplicate registrations such as, uh, Reg B provisioning example.com to Bob when it's already registered to Alice through A, the following mechanisms are in place, EPP, Extensible Provisioning Protocol. That's a mouthful. Registrars use EPP to communicate with the registry for their respective TLD. Uh, when a registrar attempts to register a domain name, they send an EPP request to the registry. The registry checks if the domain name is available, and if so, it creates a new registration record.

Registry Lock, when a registrar successfully registers the domain name, the registry locks the domain name to prevent other registrars from registering it. This lock is implemented through the EPP protocol.

WHOIS Database, each registry maintains a WHOIS database that contains information about registered domain names including the registrar, record registrant, contact information and name server details. so it sounds like, okay, so this flow is probably a good description.

Registrar A sends an EPP request to the .com registry. The registry checks if example.com is [00:39:00] available. And if so, creates a new registration record. The registry locks example.com to prevent other registrars from registering it. Got it. So basically it looks like there's just this kind of database called the registry and all the registrars have to talk to this registry to see if it's available or not. And the, the root name server, the registry, I'm assuming that the registry is the one that controls the, uh, root like name, authoritative name server for .com, .net, whatever your CD is.

Jordan Bravo: Yeah. Verisign. In the case of .com it says.

Stephen DeLorme: Yeah.

Jordan Bravo: Can you ask it one more question?

Yeah.

Stephen DeLorme: Say, if some authorities such as the FBI wanted to take down a domain name, how would they go about it and where are the points of failure?[00:40:00]

So if an authority like the FBI wants to take down domain, they, you know, coordinate with various stakeholders, uh, identification investigation. FBI identifies the domain in the question, conducts an investigation to gather evidence of illicit activities.

Obtaining a court order, the FBI contains a court order that warrants them to seize or suspend the domain, US federal court issues says.

Notify the registrar, FBI notifies the registrar of record for the domain, GoDaddy, Namecheap, et cetera, provides them with the court order.

Registrar's response, the registrar typically comply with the court order by suspending the domain name, making it an accessible to the public.

And then the, the registrar will transfer the domain name to a holding account or a new registrar effectively taking control of the domain. And then they update the who has records to reflect the change in status. And I'm assuming that happens through that EPP protocol that was discussed in the previous one.

Registry involvement, if the registrar is [00:41:00] unable to take action, or if the domain name is registered with a registrar that is not cooperative, the FBI may need to involve the registry that would be verified for .coms, so the registry can then update the root zone and who has records to reflect the suspension or transfer of the domain name.

And then name server updates. The FBI may also need to update the name server records for the domain name to point a new IP address or a holding page. So yeah.

Jordan Bravo: This is cool. These points of failure.

Stephen DeLorme: Points of failure, non-cooperative registrars. So yeah, obviously that would prevent the FBI from taking down. Domain name proxy services, if the domain name is registered through a proxy service, it may be more challenging for the FBI to identify the true owner of the domain intake action.

Yeah. I think a caveat on that is like just because the human is proxied, if they want the website to be taken down, you could still ask the registry to take it down.

Jordan Bravo: Right. That with number one, non-cooperative registrars, it says if the registrar is not based in the US, or is not willing to comply with the order. The FBI may [00:42:00] face difficulties in taking down the domain name. That's the one that intrigues me because I'm thinking there's gotta be registrars in different jurisdictions that are attractive for privacy minded people who you know, like they're gonna be the same way you have jurisdictional arbitrage. You have some jurisdictions that are more favorable for privacy. I would guess that there are certain domain name registrars in different jurisdictions that might have a little more backbone when it comes to standing up against take down orders.

Stephen DeLorme: Yeah, and it could be the case. I think, it's interesting because, you know, a lot of times it's so easy to buy domain names these days, and we have so many TLDs to choose from, but kind of a different level of service from uh, different TLDs. So for example, like.com is the most ubiquitous and they're a little bit pricey these days, and a lot of the good ones have been taken.

But, I've, I've found a pretty flat, consistent level of service with those. But then, you know, you'll run into some that have special [00:43:00] considerations like. I think for like .movie, you need to like kind of like prove that you have like a, a film in distribution. .film, you can get pretty liberally, but .movie I think requires more, uh, you know, stuff or like .dev is supposed to be for like developer related stuff. I don't know if Google, Google runs that one. I don't know if they've ever taken anybody down, but it's reserved for that. And it's also one of the pricier ones too. .app is incredibly pricey. Cause it's like so desirable. They, you know, you people, uh, with SaaS, software, you know, startups, want that .app domain and are willing to, you know, pay a premium for it.

Uh, but then you get into stuff like the the .io and. I did, did we talk about that on another episode or something? That, that, you know, like .io was like the famous, you know,

Jordan Bravo: Indian Ocean.

Stephen DeLorme: Yeah. Is that what it is? Indian Ocean. I was saying it was the famous like, technology, like website, you know, you end-

Jordan Bravo: We, we talked about that, but [00:44:00] I don't think it was on an episode.

Stephen DeLorme: Okay. But yeah, so like the .io, it's just. It's like in the, you know, 2010s. It was like every cool, like developer project had a .io domain name. It just like, it was like your way of signaling your, like what, you know, in the tech industry or whatever.

Jordan Bravo: Input output.

Stephen DeLorme: Yeah, I guess so. But, uh, the thing about it was that, uh, yeah, there was like some, I don't know, issue recently where the registrar was going down or something like that.

Jordan Bravo: I think what happened was, I think last year, maybe 2024, 2023. But there was a change in jurisdiction because, whatever country the .io name was part of, it was previously a British colony or territory, something like that.

And then that territory or colony got its independence or some kind of change in the jurisdiction of no longer being under that British authority. And so there was a new whole jurisdictional system for them. And therefore, the domain [00:45:00] name now is going to a new owner, so to speak, a new l ike authority. And that authority did not have to honor the existing domain names. So I didn't follow what ended up happening with that. But there were kind of two possibilities. One was they would, going forward, they would continue to honor existing domain name registrations and it would just sort of go on as usual. And the other was like, they would just say no, we're starting over with, with .io domains.

Stephen DeLorme: Yeah. And so I guess, you know, we'll have to check the status of that later. But the point with that is that it was a scare, like, there can be these interruptions in service, especially when you're dealing with like, you know, like a registrar and like some colony out in the ocean or whatever like it's just not the same as like having a .com through. Another example is .xyz. This has become the new hip tech project name to have like your website ending in .xyz. But this was actually an issue in the Fediment community, because there were people trying to start federations, which [00:46:00] were kind of like these community Bitcoin banks to put it succinctly.

And, uh, some federations had started and the guardians of those federations, the people who like the node, the node runners who kind of run the bank, they had XYZ domain names for their guardian nodes. And some of the guardians went down because for some reason, the XYZ, uh, like domain Regi, like I, I guess it was the XYZ registry or I, I don't know what step in the process this happened, but a bunch of XYZ domain names got taken down.

It was actually this huge kerfuffle Fediment and the, the Fediment team eventually, you know, created a fix for the problem. And so those guardians were able to get back up and running under different domain names. But it is a problem. So it's like, you, you go through a.com domain name, and I think it's a very stable, robust, steady level of service. But you are kind of in the system, so to speak. You [00:47:00] can go through these other TLDs that go through, like other, you know, like other countries and stuff and you may the regulations, requirements may be a little bit different for those, but there's also kind of like this risk of like, what if something happens with that TLD? Not saying you shouldn't use those, it's just there's trade offs.

Jordan Bravo: Alright, now why are we even talking about this? Are we trying to foment a revolution where the FBI is gonna come after us and our listeners and take down our websites? Probably not. However, it's one of many steps in building up our sovereign computing life, our, our digital fortress, and each of these steps by themselves is not, make or break, do or die, but it's, it's layers of security and privacy that build a solid foundation.

Alright, let's read some boost. We got a boost from Clockwork for 500 SATs and I believe that [00:48:00] was on the episode of,

Stephen DeLorme: I think it was just, it was on the show itself.

Jordan Bravo: On the show itself. Alright, well thank you Clockwork. We appreciate your boost.

Stephen DeLorme: A silent boost.

Jordan Bravo: Silent boost. Just. No message. Just appreciate your support there. And then we also got some streaming SATs from Weird Robot. So thank you. Weird robot. 1200 SATs were streamed in. We really appreciate that. Appreciate the support and that you're listening. Remember, if you, if any of you would like to support the show, you can boost in or stream SATs with an app like Fountain. You can also email us. Our email address is sovereign@atlbitlab.com and stay tuned for more ways to contact us in the future. We're gonna be adding a matrix room anytime soon. We've been teasing that for a while and we promise you it is coming soon. Tm, that's trademark for soon. Anything else you wanna cover today, Stephen?

Stephen DeLorme: No, I [00:49:00] think, uh, I think I'm good.

Jordan Bravo: Alright. Thanks a lot everybody, and we'll see you next time.

How to Get an Anonymous Website - The Sovereign Computing Show (SOV015)

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

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