Comment by hlandau

So I assume DLT is a generic/more general term for blockchain technology.

There's this thing called Zooko's triangle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle), basically the premise that an identifier can only have two of the following properties: secure, decentralized, human-readable.

But a blockchain can actually be used to square this triangle and get all three. The original example of this is the Namecoin project, a fork of Bitcoin using a lightly modified Bitcoin codebase which can be used as a key-value store.

The idea is that a blockchain can be used to create a decentralized database mapping keys (domain names) to values (which can be things like IP addresses, but also PKI trust anchors, similar to DANE). Thus this can eliminate the need for a CA. You can also use it to map human-readable names to .onion addresses. There is also root-of-trust transparency built in since the contents of the database is public and any changes are also public. The right to change a key-value entry belongs to the public key of the person who registered that key. Nobody can override this. Namecoin domain names use the .bit (unofficial) TLD.

It's a really neat technology and also makes things like censorship via domain suspensions, your registrar getting hacked, etc. infeasible.

Full disclosure, I previously worked on the Namecoin project, I authored the DNS resolution daemon and the technical specification for the format of DNS data in the KV store. Unfortunately public interest in the project has waned, and deployment is the real issue - you have to have the client software to be able to resolve these domain names. There is at least some conceivable possibility Tor might ship it in their bundle in the future though, so people could type example.bit in Tor Browser to get to a hidden service. The project remains active though.