did-dht-method VS bittorrent.org

TBD is the company I work at. It's a business unit within Block. created its own DID method called DID:DHT. DHT stands for Distributed Hash Table indicating the use of Mainline DHT. You can learn more about DID:DHT via the spec and this blog post from TBD’s Director of Open Standards, Gabe Cohen.

This is pretty neat, but you should publish a spec for Pkarr -- the layer below did-dht -- first. Right now Pkarr is a software program/library, not a specification. I think this will help you simplify and articulate your work more clearly to people who aren't immersed in it. I think it will also be extremely useful to people who don't need the incredible complexity of w3c DIDs.

The choice to sign an entire DNS packet seems very strange and probably hasn't been through through properly.

Why use DNS packets? Presumably because you want to leverage the existing infrastrucure of recursive DNS resolvers. However these resolvers do not preserve packets!. If I send a query to my recursive resolver, and it makes a query to the authoritative server, it can (and almost always does) modify the resulting packet from the authoritative before returning a reply to me.

The upshot here is: if you're signing packets, almost all recursive resolvers will destroy your signatures. This is why DNSSEC signs individual resource records instead of packets. I think that's what you want to be doing: sign an RR, not a packet. If you absolutely need to sign multiple RRs, you'll need to specify a canonical way to assemble the RRs (i.e. sort them). But I really think you want to sign a single RR, which includes the hash of other RRs.

Lastly, please take this issue more seriously: https://github.com/TBD54566975/did-dht-method/issues/80#issu... the only response given was that "the DHT-DID [spec] uses Pkarr [a piece of software]" which makes no sense... specs depend on specs, not implementations. Then the issue derailed (as unthreaded discussions always do... gee thanks github for ruining everything) into some side tangent about KRPC and CBOR instead of addressing "why DNS?".

At TBD, we actually took a blockchain-less approach. We anchored DID:DHT to BitTorrent. As mentioned above, DID:DHT uses a Mainline DHT, which is a distributed hash table used by the BitTorrent protocol.

While many companies in this space use blockchain for data storage, we use our own invention –Decentralized Web Nodes. Many companies in this space use blockchain to anchor their DIDs. Instead, we made our own DID method and anchored it on BitTorrent.