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I like the concept of using a key/value store that is separate from the Bitcoin chain (preventing bloat), but utilizing the Bitcoin hashpower for security.

  • What are the dominant issues working against Namecoin today?

  • What can be done to correct those issues?

  • If you were to reboot the Namecoin project, what changes or improvements would you make?

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  • Which issues are you trying to fix? – Nick ODell Mar 4 '13 at 17:23
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    @NickODell - I've read on this forum and others that NMC is worthless and the project may stall. Perhaps I should rephrase the question to ask for a list of issues and how to correct them. – halfbit Mar 4 '13 at 17:32
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First, NMC is not worthless, it have a value and is traded on bitparking ( https://exchange.bitparking.com/main ) and btc-e ( https://btc-e.com/exchange ), with decent daily trading volume; people saying nmc is worthless are just people wanting to attract you to other altchains( most of them being scams imo ) .

Second, namecoin is an opensource network, it cant really die as long as people use it. Also, namecoin is the oldest and most serious alternative coin ( altchain ) to bitcoin. NMC price have gone down with merged mining ( increased supply ), but merged mining also made namecoin very secure and long lasting. As long as someone will maintain the software ( https://github.com/namecoin/namecoin ) namecoin will rock as the oldest and best altchain.

Real issues are :

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  • "people saying nmc is worthless are just people wanting to attract you to other altchains" this is totally not true. – o0'. Mar 5 '13 at 0:41
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Namecoin has a bunch of issues, e.g. it is missing several improvements that Bitcoin got.

The real problem is that nobody has found a way to use it (general data storage) in a way that many people considered useful.

On http://namecoin.info and in the wiki you can find plenty of suggestions for use cases. If you can find one and implement it and it takes off than Namecoin might gain strength as a whole, too.

My latest idea: selling links (no external communication necessary: you pay and receive back a name containing a message encrypted with the public key of the address you payed from)

As many of the other use cases it would be mostly useful for illegal stuff, that's why I am hesitant to go for it.

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  • 1
    I don't understand how Namecoin could be used for illegal stuff. Can you generally describe what you're referring to? – halfbit Mar 5 '13 at 14:56
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Namecoin is great but has a couple of problems:

  • they are too many too complicated ideas around and this confuses and scares people It needs to make simple and good some basic issues:
    • trading namecoins
    • registering .bit domains
    • simple support of .bit domains / Finish. That's all.

  • to reduce registration fees in namecoins was the biggest mistake because created surplus of namecoins and made them too cheap what let the people beleave they are valueless How to fix this:

    • increase registration fee at least to double
    • increase 4 times the destroyed namecoins by registration

To restart the chain or to change the block reward inflationary would kill namecoin because nobody would trust any more this system.

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What are the domainant issues working against Namecoin today?

Namecoin is worthless and doomed to fail due to their policy of having the domain registration and renewal cost next to nothing.

With the current Namecoin generation rate, you could register or renew ~2500~5000 new domains every 10 minutes, which doesn't make sense.

Since registering domains is basically free, anyone could cheaply squat them all. And no one bothers to to it precisely because it could be done so easily.

This is the most prominent reason why Namecoin failed. Other reasons are that they didn't even realise they should have considered what to do when NMCs would stop being generated, and that using Namecoin is actually useless since no popular DNS server supports it (as opposite to Bitcoin which can be exchanged with other currencies, i.e. it works as a currency, its intended goal).

What can be done to correct those issues?

It won't happen.

That said, anything short of resetting it changing the rules to:

  • namecoin fixed (non-decreasing) block reward
  • domain registration and renewal fixed, and much higher than now (either fixed, or somehow automatically adjusting)

And convincing some popular DNS server (8.8.8.8, 4.2.2.1) to support it.

Obviously such a thing won't happen: if it could, it would already did.

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  • What would it be adjusting to? BTC price? The only way I know of adding external dependencies is for a Bitcoin Oracle to exist, and that isn't distributed. (or might not exist today) – halfbit Mar 5 '13 at 1:03
  • @makerofthings7 of course not: aligning to external things is bad for many reasons. It could auto-adjust itself based on the amount of domains registered and renewed, for instance, more or less like the difficulty. Or it could be adjusted by consensus, like Ripple does for fees. – o0'. Mar 5 '13 at 9:33
  • @Lohoris Namecoin is not only about domains. Namecoin is a general purpose key/value data store system. – kermit Mar 5 '13 at 14:34
  • Lol @ the downvotes. I guess they come from delusional namecoin fanboys. – o0'. May 24 '13 at 13:04

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