Amidst all the discussion of alternative uses of blockchains, it is often forgotten that the very first fork of Bitcoin, Namecoin, pursued a daring vision for a decentralized, censorship-resistant internet. Greg Slepak, co-founder of the okTurtles Foundation joined us for an interesting discussion of DNS, Namecoin and how blockchains can be used to decentralize the internet.

Topics covered in this episode:

What DNS is and the role it plays in the architecture of the internet
What man-in-the-middle attacks are and why certificate authorities offer poor protection
How certificate authorities, SSL, IP routing and VPNs work
Why the current model is broken from a privacy and security perspective
How Namecoin and the blockchain could enable a decentralized and more secure internet
The security risks when online identity is tied to a private key and how they could be mitigated
What DNSChain is and what projects okTurtles is working on

Episode links:

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/089

Greg Slepak: The Turtle Crawl Towards Internet Decentralization