I thought one of the goals was for it to be fully decentralized. If I'm relying on a nameserver I trust (let's say ICANN starts running their own .bit mirror) then what's to stop ICANN from making edits to whatever they serve up as per what the US government forces them to do? If ICANN adds their .bit TLD mirror to the root servers then we're back at square 1 because most people will consume .bit through the roots. In order to deliver on the promise of decentralization it seems every client must have its own copy by default instead of relying on a trusted authority. I think that doesn't scale very well, though.
Side note: my understanding of bitcoin is that a given bitcoin network requires a central IRC server for command/control of miners. This also won't scale to an Internet-sized volume of clients.
In order to deliver on the promise of decentralization it seems every client must have its own copy by default instead of relying on a trusted authority.
No, you just need enough servers to make it unlikely any one entity could gain over 50% of the computing power on the network. So if there were 1 million simple clients and only 10,000 clients with a full block chain, then any attacker would have to exceed the computing power of those 10,000 full clients in order to subvert the network.
my understanding of bitcoin is that a given bitcoin network requires a central IRC server for command/control of miners
IRC is just used as a way of getting a list of initial peers to connect to the network. It has nothing to do with command/control of miners.
Good point about the central authority - I would be curious how they think to accomplish that.
In regards to the IRC server - IRC servers can scale horizontally using a multicast type protocol - it's been literally a decade since I've been on IRC but I am sure that this protocol must have improved and that load can always be increased (and also would leave things less centralized).
Side note: my understanding of bitcoin is that a given bitcoin network requires a central IRC server for command/control of miners. This also won't scale to an Internet-sized volume of clients.