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Is what you want "the certificate shows this server verifiably is run by the owner of the domain (or an approved proxy)?" That's not all the current regime is doing: there is a nonzero amount of "and is an upright business interest" there that crypto has well-known issues with. How would you revoke or reject certs from malware hosts? Even if LetsEncrypt isn't checking site contents, the browser vendors are still doing so, functionally replicating the original centralized PKI complaints.
You are saying censorship is baked in to the system for safety reasons. The solution here is to make censorship opt-in instead of forced. Censorship companies can run a censorship server that I query if I'm so paranoid about malware websites having TLS certs. If you make it to where I have to obey the censorship authority no matter what, then they inevitably start exploiting their power to perform political censorship.
If you're that concerned about censorship, why use TLS at all? It makes sense if you're concerned about privacy -- assuming your counterparty's certs are actually secured -- but then you also want to make sure your counterparty is who they say they are so you don't leak messages to the wrong parties.
There is a very real privacy-censorship tradeoff here that is inherent in any indirect trust scheme: unless you're trading RSA keys out-of-band with your servers (not bad if you can), the PKI problem isn't really escapable. Web of trust never worked as an alternative. Any centralized solution there begets censorship.
All I need to do is confirm the counterparty is the owner of the domain, which they are on the blockchain under this scheme. It doesn't say whether they are good people or not.
How do you trust your counterparty to keep your conversation private without knowing they are who you think they are, and not a leaky proxy?
How could they be a leaky proxy? I don't get it. Say I get 1 HTTPS-coin from a wallet and in exchange I transfer my unique ownership of themotte.org to the wallet that sent the coin. Now that wallet is the only wallet on the blockchain the owns themotte.org. There is one and only one. If they transfer it, there will still be one and only one. That wallet can now use its own keys to publish on the blockchain under its own signature the DNS config for themotte.org and the TLS certificate for themotte.org. There is one and only one under this wallet. That is the right one. How do I know themotte.org isn't owned by a racist? I don't, I have to query safetyandcensorship.org to get the reputation, if I'm in to that. But I know that themotte.org is not a «leaky proxy».
How do you know the
NSASPLC didn't pre-register themotte.org, and the pass all your queries on to what you think is the real site while logging all your traffic? Or that the block chain you see is the real one and not swapped out by your ISP with fake certs?The PKI system we have is flawed, but you generally start with certificates delivered out-of-band (even if you use Chrome, you downloaded that with TLS in Edge, for example) that would loudly fail if your ISP tries this. Doing everything in-band is a "turtles all the way down" problem.
The same way I know the bitcoin blockchain is the real one and not one swapped out with fake balances?
The SPLC would have to own themotte.org in this case? This site could be operated by the SPLC right now, has anyone talked to Zorba lately? Do we know who he's working for? This problem is orthogonal to the blockchain idea.
I'm not going to say your approach is crazy, but it isn't quite the same threat model the typical PKI infrastructure was intended to secure. You probably have more network connections at hand than was envisioned 30 years ago.
But how do you know you got the "real" bitcoin chain? Is each party resolving it separately, or are you keeping DNS servers (those have been difficult-to-authenticate, but proposed solutions rely on those darn CAs again)? Because you know the time and expect a rough block number? Secure time transfer is one of the classic difficult cryptographic problems. There are solutions, but the classical ones rely on pre-trusted servers (CAs!) and local trusted randomness. Using the cell network or GPS wasn't an option at the time, and even today there are real concerns about those (fake base stations!). And injecting bad notions of time is also a classic attack vector for using broken or revoked credentials.
In practice, I'm not sure you'd be wrong to trust a consensus time from multiple mechanisms, but that sort of thing is a very different model than the classical PKI exists to secure.
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