Bitcoin-native domain names? All about .sats

Bitcoin-native domain names?

They may look like BRC-20, but that’s where the similarities stop.

.Sats names aren’t for creating tokens: they’re for creating identities.

People have been inscribing names practically since the beginning of Ordinals.

The first inscription representing this is Inscription 58, aptly named: satoshi

And about 100 inscriptions later, Charlie Spears became the first to inscribe a username with “cbspears” on Inscription 143.

.sats names looks to bring standardization with the Sats Name System (SNS)?

Launched in February, over 300k .sats names have already been inscribed, with over 1M on other namespaces like .ord and .btc (more on that later)

SNS has three guiding principles:

1?? All namestates live on Bitcoin

Because these are inscriptions, all SNS names are stored directly on Bitcoin and don’t rely on any L2s or services like IPFS for storage.

2?? The standard will remain credibly neutral

SNS is as permissionless as Bitcoin is. There are no smart contracts or centralized services that you need to go through to inscribe a .sats name.

3?? The first write of a name on Bitcoin owns the name

The first person to inscribe a .sats name becomes its rightful owner. If someone else inscribes that same .sats name, it won’t be valid.

So how does SNS work?

In order to create a .sats name, the actual “.sats” needed to be created

This is called a namespace. There are other examples of namespaces, including .ord and .gm ??

To create a new namespace, you’d inscribe a JSON like so:

Once a namespace has been created, anyone is free to inscribe a name onto it.

There are two ways to register a name. For ultimately simplicity, you can just inscribe text like satoshi.sats and as long as you’re the first, it’s yours!

You can also get more advanced and include things like an avatar and BTC address, like this ??

The “Relay” option is where things get very cool ??

In a recent thread, we talked about how recursive inscriptions could help build an immutable web hosted forever on Bitcoin.

And now, .sats name could be the gateway to access them.

In a way, SNS names could function as a sort of decentralized DNS, with Bitcoin functioning as a global, permissionless web server.

For example, white-paper.sats redirects to an early inscribed PDF of the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Several large services are already supporting .sats names.

You can trade them on Ordinals marketplaces like Magic Eden and Unisat Wallet.

And some wallets, like UniSat and Ordinals Wallet allow you to send bitcoin to a .sats address in place of a public key.

There may be an ?? in the room from some of our followers holding .btc names on Stacks .

Luckily, the BNS Protocol is looking to integrate .sats names as well to provide a proper link between L1 and L2 ??

*There’s still ongoing debate for how to best implement this.

We’ll continue to track progress on BNS names and how they might integrate with SNS names in the future.

For now, this remains another exciting development in the world of Ordinals and the exciting potential and use cases they may bring to #Bitcoin

To quote Satoshi: “It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on”

?? We’re building the largest economy of apps on #Bitcoin

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