Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys,

Breaking news (using old media timings ;) )

Namecoin has come of age it seems, it is currently trading at 10 NMC to 1 BTC.

It is arguably more useful than BTC in that it provides a secure platform for domain name ownership that cannot have domain names reassigned by anyone except the original owner. The dept. of Homeland Security ICE is going to just be in love with it.

Miners are already shifting en-mass to namecoin (I have) and exploiting the 37 fold easier difficulty level and 10 to 1 exchange rate. It's like mining 10BTC/day where you normally only had 2. It was actually better a few days ago.

Soon we will see major pools operating both systems. Once the prices adjust and the difficulty normalizes for both systems we will have 2 crypto currencies trading at approximately the same rate to the USD.

Black Swan squawks here!

multiple crypto urrency = noone

especially if people shift from one to another, the power of a currency is in his diffusion...

The shift is because of Namecoins value beyond being a currency. Doubt there will be a third, or rather I doubt there will be a 10th...

NMC and BTC complement each other. BTC's purpose is to purchase things. NMC's main purpose is in domain registration and keeping domains alive (think of it as a token used to keep a meter running).

People who need to use namecoins (NMC) either mine them or buy them. NMC can only be bought with BTC

One does not infringe on the territory of the other. At least not at the moment.
 

One cannot exchange them directly yet for fiat.

I don't see it as an infringement, I see it simply as twice as much currency as was originally planned.

What are the generation rules of NMC vs BTC btw?

Can you shed some light on the subject Chucksta?

oh sorry, my bad, didnt read namecoin purpose, just thought was a new currency bitcoin-like.

There certainly was quite a price spike today on bitparking, +300% in 12 hours.  Who the heck is so interested in buying NMC right now?

Domain name seizures is a major problem, there are fundamentally interested parties, maybe some press reached some of them.

Easy to make that assumption. There's no reason why it could not be used to purchase things, just like with BTC, but that's not it's fundamental/initial purpose.

Frankly, all I care about, is that it is making me money :)

infact the main problem is that bitcoin and namecoin actually are used to speculate/make money so there's a volatile market and low diffusion as services..

I dont fear more krypto currencies, in fact I welcome them.

Of course if more kryptocurrencies come in, bitcoin will not be worth USD$1.000.000.000/BTC, but I will be more than happy if we reach USD$1500/BTC soon.
  ;D

That's why we need namecoin. This is good. What else can we decentralize?

Is the real money maker on this the renewal fees down the road.....

I looked at the namecoin wiki a few days ago and the guide was a little confusing. I read yesterday you can set this up now just like bitcoin mining? Is there a GUI? What's the process? Thx

Search for namecoin in the mining board. If you don't get sorted, message me.

Namecoin should modify their software so that it can mine on the same hashes as Bitcoin. It would strengthen both projects to have the added hashing power and/or mining income.

I like Namecoin because it is easy for miners to switch from mining BTC to NMC if mining NMC is more profitable. This will help it catch on, driving up value and making it good for speculation. In addition, the ability to register .bit domains with them give them an important fundamental usage. This is why instead of selling Bitcoins for dollars, I think a better hedge is to sell Bitcoins for Namecoins. I'm not offering any investment advice, just stating my opinion.

I found the compiled binary from here
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=6017.40
and downloaded http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2882613/namecoin-64.tar.gz

Now, how do I run the program to get an address so I can start mining? I assume it is similar to bitcoin wallet address.

only a matter of time until there is:

IPcoin
VersioncontrolCoin
BandwidthCoin
StorageCoin
RoutingCoin
TorCoin
LegalnoticesCoin
WillCoin
ObituaryCoin
ContractCoin
StockholderCoin
WebOfTrustCoin
MarriageCoin

etc.

Somebody start already "Credits" chain ? Just like the name, always dreamed to buy\sell something in credits. Old SciFi fun.

I don't see how speculating on the NMC price is a good thing for the Namecoin project. Pumping up the value of namecoins will prevent it from being spent on what its purpose is; registrating and updating name keys in the block chain.

That's why future versions of the client should let miners set the registration fees.

Don't get it. What can it do that bitcoin can't?

It contains a register of domain name assignments.

You can buy domain names that no government can take from you since it is based on the same distributed model as bitcoin.

The system generates namecoins and then allows the assignment of a domain name using a certain amount of coins. This allows outsiders to buy coins from namecoin miners to allow for the registration of a domain without having been involved in mining.

What is limiting the number of domain ? (stats plz)

There is currently ~80 million .com  ,   there is little to no demands for .bit and the number of domain would need to be very high for scalability.

There is demand for domain names that cannot be confiscated even by government

But who can see it?  That's what I don't have clear.

I absolutely hate verisign and I find the domain renewal scam verisign runs very annoying.

I recently had a domain I was running for 10 years taken by some European outfit because I was deep into a well paid programming project.  Laser focus.  Forgot about it.  Got burned.

When I own a namecoin .bit domain, do I own it forever?

It's early days still.  So people will need to adjust their settings to use nameservers with .bit support.  Sometime in the future .bit may be added as an official TLD... but who knows

As for your other question, in the current system, you need to keep updating the name in the blockchain every some odd blocks (i think it works out to about a month?) but this is free.. so you own it forever unless you forget to update it once a month.  But this is a fee-less update so you will never have to pay more than the namecoins you originally spent.

Renewal is free, but you may pay a fee in some cases (like bitcoin transactions). You own it while you renew before expire time and you are the only one to be able to control it !

I hope it well never become an ICANN TLD, otherwise, someone may have control on this TLD and this is against our aim.

Well, you're right but the issue is more subtle.  They already do have control over .bit but not the blockchain.  That is, ICANN may introduce a .bit TLD and NOT specify opennic (or whomever represents the namecoin blockchain) as its owner but they could never control the blockchain itself.

All of that sounds good.

The system seems rigged against alternate dns.

Why does windows have only two spots for dns?  Something like this is going to need either a lot more or a different way of doing this.

We should have some kind of application where the user download something to allow them to have an ever updating list of dns addresses…

Perhaps I'm using the wrong terms.  I'm thinking of something along the lines of ad block plus subscriptions to keep all the dot bit addresses available.

This is possible with :
- namecoin (http://dot-bit.org/Namecoin)
- a (local) proxy which will query records for .bit in namecoin
- a (local) proxy which will send request to webservers

This method is still not well explained, but it is possible and will be easy in the future :
https://dot-bit.org/HowToBrowseBitDomains#Use_a_proxy_in_your_applications

(It is not possible to query only DNS requests with a proxy and to send request without)

If any of those proved to have high demand then I think they should be incorporated to Namecoin rather than make yet another block chain. Namecoin already rejected the position that this technology should remain 'pure' and be used for financial transactions only, so there is no reason why it shouldn't continue to add value to itself with new uses. 

Seems like somebody got jealous of the top BTC guys with $6M in BTC and decided to make their own currency and hope they make a fortune from prospective adopters who don't know economics.

Please explain what's wrong with the economics of Namecoin.