How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name?

A seemingly simple question which sent me down into the murky depths of standards. How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name? It probably isn't sensible to name your online presence a----------hyphen.com - but is there anything technically stopping you? Table of ContentsHistoryTLD RestrictionsAnomaliesSo What? History Let's do some history! This is 1978's "HOST NAMES ON-LINE". Early Internet standards described the - character as "minus" rather than hyphen. RFC 608 up to 48 characters drawn from the alphabet (A-Z), digits (0-9), and the minus sign (-) ... specifically, no blank or space characters allowed; no distinction between upper and lower case letters; the first character is a letter; the last character is NOT a minus sign; no other restrictions on content or syntax. So, originally, you could have as many hyphens as you wanted after the first symbol - which had to be a letter. The last symbol had to be a letter or number0. That was later formalised in 1981's…