Article author here. Just wanted to add that if any of you work for companies that send engineers to the IETF, there is an Internet-Draft RFC that would normalize the use of several P2P pseudo-TLDs such as .gnu, .zkey, .onion, .exit, .i2p, and yes, .bit, which is what Namecoin is squatting on. Would be great to see everybody supporting it.
- Namecoin issues new coins to miners as a reward for performing merged mining with the Bitcoin network. The namecoin supply is being inflated at nearly 30% per year for several more months, then over 10% for the next several years. Domainshares only ever shrink in supply, when fees are destroyed as implicit dividends.
- Namecoin attempts to service multiple namespaces at once. .p2p is highly specialized for servicing the .p2p TLD namespace. The use case is the same as Namecoin's "d/" namespace, which is used for the .bit TLD.
- Namecoin's name registration price is fixed at any given time and is independent of the name itself. Domainshares utilizes an auction-like mechanic to incentivize price discovery for names, making sure the final owner pays what it is actually worth. The majority of the final cost will have gone to the network as dividends by the time the auction is over, with a small fraction having gone to bidders as a reward for price discovery.
- As a result of the fact that domains are expensive and there are dividends on shares but not domains, there is a high opportunity cost to squatting: holding a domain without making good use of it.
We are still working on the exact mechanics (open to suggestions!), but the simple first model is:
- The price starts at 0 and people bid it up to the market value
- If someone makes a bid B1, then someone makes a next bid B2 = B1 + D, then person 1 receives (B1 + D/2) and the remaining D/2 gets paid as fees to network (and thus become shareholder dividends)
- This incentivizes people to bid up the price to what they consider the market value, because of the extra portion they receive when they are outbid
- This also disincentivizes squatting because you will pay more for buying and selling the domain than you would have received as network dividends had someone else just bought the domain
So if I buy a cheap unused nonsense word domain (say wikipedia.org) and turn it into a valuable domain by making a popular website many people visit and link to, 'the network' gets to shake me down because wikipedia.org is worth $20,000,000 now instead of the $20 I paid for it?
And as an end user, I don't know if visiting or e-mailing wikipedia.org will take me to an encyclopedia or a cybersquatter or a porn site?
Who exactly benefits from this system, except for 'the network'?
Not sure what you mean exactly but it works like that :
Once you buy your domain at 20$ is is yours and you do whatever you want with it. The bidding auction applies only the first time you buy it nobody can touch your domain name one you purchased it.
I expect it will obsolete ICANN as effectively as AlterNIC, New.net, OpenNIC, etc.
The technical fact that it is blockchain-based really doesn't make much difference as it's incredibly unlikely to be adopted worldwide, due to the network effect of the already-established domain name system.
The telegraph, MySpace, and AOL had network effects.
It's a hurdle, but it's not insurmountable. The question is whether namecoin provides anything sufficiently more appealing to all players to overcome that headwind...
As it stands now, a domain name owner in the current system probably has more risk from domain hijacking than authoritarian censorship.
So the main feature of Namecoin - to provide a censorship-resistant, cryptographically untamperable set of domain name records - is also its biggest disadvantage, as recovery of any stolen domain names is entirely up to the goodwill of the thief.
This reason alone would make it very unappealing for most domain name owners, because as well as going against the established domain name system, it must also break societal expectations of redressing thefts through legal means.
"So the main feature of Namecoin - to provide a censorship-resistant, cryptographically untamperable set of domain name records"
And the above means zilch to the majority (let's pick an arbitrary 95%) of domain name owners (source: I am intimately involved in this business since the start and deal with these owners)
Do people seriously think that the millions of existing domain name owners are going to undo years of marketing effort for something that they don't even need? Local restaurant for example has no issues with censorship at least with respect to their website.
I agree. It may have a solid use case in providing name services alongside existing anti-censorship, anonymised networks like Tor and I2P, but for mainstream use Namecoin provides no benefit.
I don't know anything about the project but it looks like there is a working implementation of the protocol in ruby in that linked repository (just not in the master branch).
There is also an in-progress c++ implementation of the protocol in a different repo [1].
Even so, it's pretty clear that the thing isn't ready yet and even states that it shouldn't be used for anything other than test data.
Related question: Is there a Bitcoin wallet where the blockchain resides on a server and the client is only used for signing transactions, with the server never seeing the public key, ever? That would be pretty damn useful.
Development has slowed to a crawl, but http://datacoin.info is still alive. It focuses on redundancy, as all participants have a full copy of the database, and so data amounts are small (1 datacoin = 20kb). Still, there's a potential use case there for text-only content.
Definitely looking forward to distributed storage apps; other projects in progress include BitCloud, MaidSafe, and Ethereum.
Participating in Datacoin sounds legally dangerous. All a miscreant needs to do is include into its blockchain some files that are illegal to possess, and everyone is potentially in trouble.
Such link could be sent with a bank transfer too - I don't think you could then claim the bank holds and spreads the links to child abuse. Or could you?
That's an interesting scenario, and I don't know how much distinction is made between possession of illegal material and possession of a means of instantly retrieving it.
Datacoin has the storage capacity to include the actual images as part of the blockchain though, not just (probably quite ephemeral) links to such.
I have been looking at *coins for a while and the implications of the blockchain-based concensus system are interesting.
The system really maps the real world onto computers very well, in that it reduces what used to be technical issues to "political" issues. These systems work on concensus, and as such, require a significant amount of interested parties to work in the expected way. They are very much subject to network effects that only occur after critical mass is reached.
Blockchains are being used to implement solutions to different problems, and they could really solve some significant problems such as decentralized identity and reputation management (!). The difficulty lies in creating a significant enough "currency" so that miners will become involved and make the blockchain stable and reliable.
Bitcoin is a currency in a much stronger sense than namecoin or any other of "not-really-money-coins" around. I wonder if piggybacking on bitcoin might actually be the solution for this situation (i.e introduce other information in the bitcoin blockchain instead of using a brand new one).
Sadly, adding external information to the blockchain could be construed as "spamming the blockchain" and therefore not deemed worthy for inclusion in the bitcoin blockchain by miners. So there is a big challenge there.
If you are interested in this topic and want to work on related projects feel free to reach out (google my username).
> Blockchains are being used to implement solutions to different problems, and they could really solve some significant problems such as decentralized identity and reputation management (!). The difficulty lies in creating a significant enough "currency" so that miners will become involved and make the blockchain stable and reliable.
Author of the original article here. Namecoin is actually merge-mined with Bitcoin, so miner participation is not a serious problem. There's no way you could have known that without happening to know that, though, and I agree that this is an issue for a lot of new blockchain-based technologies.
Maybe I've misunderstood it, but how does merge mining create an incentive to mine namecoins? I figured all it did was make it "cheaper" to mine namecoins by "reusing" work done for the bitcoin blockchain. In order for the namecoin network to function, you still need to actively get involved with it.
Merged mining has good incentives since it basically gives free money; for the same work of mining Bitcoin you can mine Bitcoin and Namecoin simultaneously.
I'm not too sure. A lot of people in the cryptocurrency community are saying that something like Namecoin is going to be the second major blockchain-based technology after payments, so maybe it just got the right kind of press at the right time, as you say.
What I'm interested in the most would be a new way to do Email. P2P and secure. I can't believe that most of us are still sending Email unencrypted but then again can you really blame us? PGP has failed not only in its main use case (trust in people, really?) but most of all in terms of usablity.
Both of them will resolve to whatever info is stored in d/okturtles domain.
With the (soon-to-be) DANE support (for those who forgot: DANE is about distributing TLS keys through a channel you trust (it comes from the domain you're visiting) but that is not the same as the final application (it's DNS, not HTTP/SMTP/IMAP/XMPP/etc), so you can prevent MiTM), I don't see what's missing technically to have our own internet.
> DANE is about distributing TLS keys through a channel you trust
Only to the extent that you and your visitors already have to trust your DNS provider, your domain registrar, the TLD registry, and the DNS root. Neither DANE nor DNSSEC intrinsically solve anything that hasn't already been solved for end users... particularly when you consider forwarders will have to accept unsigned zones for years to come.
Namecoin etc does go some way to "squaring Zooko's triangle" (as many good minds have discussed already) but proof-of-work chains have their own burdens, and are not any more immune to the lure of trading robustness and security for convenience than traditional DNS forwarders, online DNSSEC signing, or webmasters offering up their SSL certificates up to CDNs.
They have to be updated around every 36,000 blocks (about 250 days), or else you relinquish the name. It can be just a "touch" update, no need to change the information.
No, you could not register those names. Because they are already registered.
They could ask very nicely for ownership of them, or perhaps send you a court order depending on what country the both of you were located in. But unless you provide them with the private key or fail to renew your registration... nobody should ever gain control of any .bit domain.
A Kraken.com dev looking into the namecoin code found a flaw and declared on the Namecoin blockchain that "Namecoin died October the 15th 2013, coinslayer" by re-writing the DNS values for the very first .bit domain ever registered (which is bitcoin.bit).
The flaw allowed for some people to "steal" domain ownership, but a patch was put through and everything is back to normal now. As far as I know, all domains are back in the hands of the original registrars.
Okay, so right here you've got a reason why namecoin won't be adopted. There is a critical mass of many, many memorable names. These organizations already have them in the current system; don't have them on the namecoin (since someone likely is squatting on them) and, as you say, have no reasonable way to gain them w/o paying extortion.
Due to network effects, namecoin won't replace ICANN without making it better for all those organizations; and due to the core nature of namecoin, it won't be better for them.
Bob's Bakery Buns isn't likely to pick a web address that - at this stage - requires potential visitors to his site to download a plugin to find it. I'd be interested to see what percentage of major brands' .bit addresses become owned by the brands rather than squatters. If the latter percentage is sufficiently high you can pretty much guarantee that fear of phishing will make browser vendors very wary of seamlessly integrating .bit resolution into the standard browser build.
How long does it take to resolve a namecoin key=>value pair? Considering the variable speed in these sorts of decentralized networks, is there a noticeable lag when you initially request a .bit website?
Just as fast as a DNS lookup. It can be cached anywhere (even locally, with your own name server on your own machine).
It's also almost exactly the same as DNS regarding name changing. You have to wait about 10 minutes for the blockchain to register a name, and then about 24 hours before all the cache servers update it.
Sure, decentralized networks can have variable speeds, but you could put a caching layer in front and the problem should be solved, no? The writes will be variable, but reads don't have to be.
All the blockchain is local. The time taken to resolve a key->value pair is the time your software takes to decode information from your disk; it's nothing compared to DNS.
Change propagation, on the other hand, is as long as blocks can travel from peer to peer.
Pretty sure the intersection of the set of people who worry about DNS performance and the set of people who are still running servers exclusively off spinning rust is nigh-vanishing...
The broadband connection usually has latency depending on the protocol. ADSL2+ with data interleaving can be as high as 32ms. DOCSIS has at least 5ms for the first hop too. And that assumes your ISP's (or whichever) DNS server is close from a network perspective and that it has enough power to instantly send a reply down the wire.
To me the real problem with namecoin for the purpose stated in the title of this post is that it doesn't emphasize delegation to near the degree necessary to achieve it. The current implementation is much more like the older name system in that it requires the list of canonical names to be distributed as widely as possible.
There is a reason the root nameservers only delegate the act of name lookup at the top level. It's just not practical for them to have a complete list, and it's not even particularly desirable for users of it to have their list of names completely public (think internal servers).
It is possible to name a delegate nameserver through namecoin, I believe, but last I looked it was a bit iffy and it doesn't require any kind of authentication of results from the delegated nameserver a-la dnscurve.
Why do we asume that domains have to be 'unique' like trade/brand names? I have a name, shared with my grandfather, father and son; in the right context, you would never confuse one for another. Furthermore, my name is shared by probably thousands in my country; again, I have never been confused with any of them. So, if the whole point is to translate human readable (and memorable) words to IPs, and in the event that the DNS returns more than one result, can't the browser display a search-results-like page letting one know there are options? Wikipedia does it and that is THE descentralized knowledge store of the planet. Maybe if I type homes.com I mean local homes first, like Google rankings, but is ok if someone else is using homes.com elsewhere.
There is https://dotbit.me/ , but who knows how reputable that site is? Just as Bitcoin needed something like Coinbase, the Namecoin ecosystem needs a web wallet with reputable backing.
As hopeful as people may be, humans don't surround themselves with the best security. Sure, stealing it without the private key may be impossible, but stealing the private key can be very possible.
Namecoin is just a name/value store system. That's it. It might not be perfect for DNS but it's being used for other things like https://onename.io right now.
The public can choose to use it in it's current implementation or build a better way of dealing with domain hijacking should they so choose.
Sure, it has a wide variety of niches which it fits greatly, and where it can be successfully used - but if anybody considers it as a solution to obsolete ICANN, as the original article proposes, then it's an entirely different ballpark than being just a name/value store; and rather different criteria for success.
"(...) the cryptographic-decentralization Zeitgeist makes it an exciting time to have and use names"
Yes. Very true. For anyone interested in the above statment i'd highly recommend checking out http://twister.net.co/ - a decentralized micro-blogging spin-off of bitcoin. Unbelievable innovation is happening!
Could we just get rid of naming authorities all together? Why not just let trusted listing agencies handle it and users can simply pick the one(s) they wish to use. For instance, let's say I want to publish a website under the name "sony". Okay, that's fine, but it's going to get a lower priority then the offical Sony, Inc. site b/c any listing agency is obviously going to serve up that site when a user puts "sony" in their browser's address bar. However, a user could opt for an alternate listing agency --maybe one the offers no commercial listings, and then maybe my site would come up through them. Browsers could make it easy to switch between listing agencies and prioritize them.
This is already possible with the current DNS system. The listing agencies are commonly called "DNS servers" and they may chose to disregard the authoritive DNS servers. End users can typically list which DNS servers they want to use by order of priority within their OS/browser DNS settings.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-grothoff-iesg-special-use-p...