Bitcoin Forum

Hello,
Namecoin (NMC) seems to be doing poorly lately. What are the uses of Namecoins? Bitcoins laundering?

Distributed censorship resistant domain names.

Mapping names such as hostnames or nicknames to public key fingerprints

Messaging.

Register a bitcoin address, namecoin address, XMPP/jabber ID, email address, SIP address, street address, URL, etc to an alias.

Web of trust.

File sharing via magnet links/info hashes.

Voting.

Title system & asset/share/bond transfer.

I'm wondering what you mean by "Doing poorly"? 
Just curious because your message comes after the first rise in price of namecoins in a long time. 

Nice list DannyM, though the only one I've seen in use is #1 on your list. 

.onion addresses are long and not human memorable.

Mapping a short, catchy .bit url to an onion address would help TOR ease-of-use.

10000 NMC for 40 BTC... lots of people don't get it then. :-\

Maybe because it is mined alongside Bitcoin.
So most miners looking to sell those NMC to increase profit without knowing their uses.

I really think the only reason NMC is around is because some big pools support merged mining.

Who are doing these type of projects for namecoin?

I have made a proposal for aux transactions in ppcoin. I hope interested developers of these potential applications take a look at the ppcoin proposal and it addresses the block chain bloating issue.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113615.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=113615.0)

There's no-one's "doing it"--it's built into namecoin.

That's not true. You need to have external applications writing and interpreting the data. Even the buit-in domain name system needs external supporting applications. You can't say that oh because you can register a name value pair then now it has a web-of-trust system built in, can you? So where is my indirect trust score of some user?

That's why Bookmarks feature was introduced with Internet Explorer 3.0 shipping with Windows 95

.onion does not require any CPU or GPU heating house to be secure (well merged mining solves partially that problem)

.bit does not protect the anonymity of server serving it

I consider Namecoin .bit domains almost useless because there are projects that solves the same problem more efficiently and more properly.

One difference between .bit and .onion is that web clients don't have to be running TOR to access a .bit address; they simply have to use a .bit enabled DNS server.  As using TOR is balls slow, I find it rather annoying if I don't care about being anonymous.

I'm only getting namecoins because it comes with my bitcoins compliments of BTC Guild.  I'd love to use them, but I couldn't even get a local wallet installed properly.  For those of us that don't have the time to study a technology's inner workings, I've found Namecoin useless.  Give me a simple GUI application that allows me to utilize Namecoin for URL's and that displays all these crazy options.  If the average user can't use a technology it doesn't have a chance for mainstream.  Bitcoin is still a bit too hard for people outside of this community.  Entrepenures that are actually paying for websites to sell goods or maintain a news/social community aren't going to be able to use Namecoin.  Its a technology that is iffy for .onion developers.  That doesn't say much. 

+1

I realize this thread`s been dead for a while - but if you want to set up a Namecoin wallet, you can follow this guy`s video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezo1t90QLFQ).  There are other tutorials, but when I originally set mine up, this is how I did it.

Basically, when you launch the namecoind server in windows, it`ll sit there appearing to do nothing.  In fact, it is listening and downloading the blockchain.  You then use a separate command prompt to actually interact with namecoind.  I agree that it`s a little unwieldy for the average Windows user, but there`s something to be said for being an early adopter and wading through the less-polished stuff.  If you wait until there`s a shiny, easy to use GUI to work with, you`re way bast the bleeding edge, and more like at the trailing edge.  The benefits are largely used up by then.  People tend to profit from doing things other people either don`t know how to do or aren`t willing to learn how to do, or both.

So only speculation, for now.

It's at a buy point right now. If it dips below .006, I'd wait until it hits .003 to buy again. Seems to be where previous support elvels were at.