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What are Namecoins exactly, how do they differ from Bitcoins, and how come one is able to merge mine them along with Bitcoins?

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2 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

Namecoin is a distribuited DNS system where information held about a web address (MX, A, etc) are held within the coin itself. Advantages of this are no other company holds the address, unique ownership will always be had due to the way the bitcoin works. (no man in the middle attacks, CA will no longer be needed)

Specific DNS servers are required to browse these sites. There are a handful of public servers available.

The code is being reviewed on a regular basis as it is very young and building a unique usable specification is a challenging task, even with all the features bitcoin has left in place for it.

At this time the extension is .bit although this can be changed or even removed completely if wanted.

Merged Mining, How will it work? will provide details on Merged Mining.

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What does CA mean in your second sentence? – shoeless joe Dec 7 '11 at 7:00
Certificate Authority – MaxSan Dec 8 '11 at 12:03
up vote 1 down vote

I don't think it's worth repeating the information, for this particular question I think the best answer would be two links:

Namecoin and Merged Mining

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Why the downvote? Does the information in the wiki not answer the question? – ripper234 Oct 12 '11 at 12:34
To supply an answer to a reasonable question that has not already been asked is best. If we were to use links then many questions here could be presented with links to the bitcoin wiki (which it seems is discouraged). – MaxSan Oct 12 '11 at 13:17
@MaxSan Well, IMO if a wiki page exactly answers a question, then it's a good answer even if the information is on a 3rd party site ... but if people disagree they're free to downvote me, no worries. – ripper234 Oct 12 '11 at 13:32
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Even when linking you should at least summarise the linked content--what if the link changes or dies sometime down the road? – eMansipater Oct 12 '11 at 14:21
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@eMansipater - Then the answer can be edited. But I'll accept my 2 downvotes, no need to debate it. – ripper234 Oct 12 '11 at 14:56

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