I’m not necessarily defending web3, but you’re asking the wrong question. Your same question could have been asked about email in general in the early aughts. But clearly, mass adoption happened, and the calculus changed. Sure, your statement is strictly correct, but completely uninteresting.

What question did I ask that was "the wrong question"? I thought both the questions I put were rhetorical. Let's try:

"What does email have to do with email domains?"

"How does one receive email from e.g. one's bank, at an email domain?"

No, I don't think my questions could equally have been asked about email in the early aughts (nor at any other time - those rewritten questions don't make sense).

Mass adoption had already happened by the early aughts; email was adopted universally in the corporate world in the mid-nineties.

Of course, what is interesting to you is your business.

All you need is to have DNS servers reading ENS' equivalent of MX records. Failing that, you can even have that implemented at the email client or OS level.

Sorry, but that seems to require that my bank and all my friends adopt some skanky modified DNS resolver. Is that right? How exactly does that benefit them?

And the alternative you're suggesting is that they replace their OS, or adopt some mutant mail client? Few of my friends have ever used a proper email client at all. And which alternative OS implements this? And again, what incentive do my correspondents have to switch OS?

Really, if this is "all I need", it's clearly not a proposal that has much to do with the real world.

> How exactly does that benefit them?

If your friends wants to access a website that has been blocked by some authority, they can with this system. With the status quo, they can not.

> replace their OS or adopt some mutant mail client?

No, there is nothing stopping MS or Apple from adding this functionality to their own systems. All it would take is for them to see increased demand for it.

> not a proposal that has much to do with the real world.

What I am describing is a possible solution for a very specific problem, namely the lack of distributed identity systems (domain names) that are permissionless and censorship-resistant.

You are right that this is not a concern for the majority of people "in the real world", but the whole conversation started because someone is talking about how many people lost access to their emails and domains due to abuse/mismanagement/arbitrary rule enforcement from different domain registrars.

IOW, if you are okay with the status quo, good for you. But consider yourself privileged and don't dismiss the complaints of those who are building and asking for better alternatives.

> If your friends wants to access a website that has been blocked by some authority, they can with this system. With the status quo, they can not.

OK; if the blockage is that authoritative DNS records are unavailable, this system could help. At the cost of all visitors installing an alternative DNS client stack. But most websites subject to DNS blocking just move to a new domain; TPB seems to manage. More generally, you could simply move your DNS hosting out of the reach of the problematic authority. Unless the website owner made the mistake of using a subdomain of e.g. a repressive CCTLD.

> IOW, if you are okay with the status quo, good for you.

I'm not OK with the status-quo; we know DNS is problematic. But you suggested that this system is simple ("All you need is..."). You didn't mention that (a) the problem it addresses is constrained to the blocking of authoritative DNS, nor (b) that no alternative mail client or OS actually exists.

> At the cost of all visitors installing an alternative DNS client stack.

That will be a requirement only until the bigger players don't integrate this directly. Nothing stopping Cloudflare/Google/OpenDNS to provide integration with ENS.

Anyway, you make it sound like this is just a niche required by a few dozen people. The Brave browser is used by 60 million people already and can handle .eth TLD (and other TLDs from unstoppable domains) natively. It is not a big of a deal as you are making it out to be.

> More generally, you could simply move your DNS hosting out of the reach of the problematic authority.

Or we can build a system where we do not have to play whack-a-mole just to use a service?

> You didn't mention that (a) the problem it addresses is constrained to the blocking of authoritative DNS,

I said that is the most obvious benefit, but I didn't say it was constrained to that. Look up again at the top of the thread: people are getting shut out of "reputable" registrars established in "democratic jurisdictions" without recourse.