Bitcoin Forum

So I've been looking into namecoin and the .bit quasi tld.
It might be a little spendy, but is anyone interested in seeing .bit become a proper TLD with ICANN?
If so post here, if I see enough interest I'll try to put together a project proposal and see if I can round up interest with a few of the registrars.

Thanks!

p.s.  Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, feel free to move it if necessary.

doesn't going under ICANN and using the current system kind of defeat the purpose of .bit?

I know a few people would be interested Nova!

Costs $185,000 to apply to ICANN. And that's just the application fee. Many hurdles to jump through apart from that e.g. you have to employ the services of a registry to actually manage the TLD, have finances in place (and no, bitcoins won't count yet  :) )

Also, we are currently in the middle of launching the new gTLD program at ICANN. There are close to 2,000 new TLDs waiting to be approved / put in the root. This process is likely to take a couple of years. No more applications for new TLDs are being taken under this first "wave" is finished.

As for "rounding up interest" with registrars, you don't need to do that. Registrars will sell all TLDs in the root. They aren't fussy.

First step is to decide whether there is a end-user market for the domain and present a business plan as part of your initial application to ICANN.

Wow, thanks for the info.  I know a few people that would be interested in namecoin and .bit due to it's inherent censorship resistance.  $185k is a lot for just an application fee, but not untenable if a business case can be made, but I'm glad to know that the process is that bureaucratized.

Seems like that may be much more effort than it's worth.  Wonder if there is a way to join bind to namecoind for the purposes of lookups.  If enough people implemented bind/named it wouldn't really matter much what ICANN does.

Would .bit even keep its "inherent censorship resistance" as an ICANN TLD?

It would be better to have popular dns servers running the software (imagine having .bit as part of opendns or google dns)

Google DNS doesn't (and won't) support "Alt TLDs" - they have actually applied for quite a few new TLDs through the new TLD program. Not as many as Amazon but that's a different topic.

One of the downsides of setting up outside the ICANN root is if you do that, and someone then applies for ".bit" as a new TLD via ICANN, you will lose because ICANN does not recognise alt TLD roots.

Having ".bit" as an ICANN TLD would be great IMHO. But like I said, it could be a coupe of years or more before ICANN accept any more applications. Could coincide nicely with bitcoins going "prime-time"  :)

If some company registered the .bit TLD it would be a bad for namecoin. One thing is to only be able to access the domains using certain conditions, but being unable to get to .bit domains from the ICANN could be a reason to not use namecoin.

I think the plan should be to get the TLD and use it as a proxy to connect the standard DNS and the namecoin DNS. An Ad could be added on top of every page that goes  thru the proxy informing the user to install the namecoin client and the advantatges of doing so, or a Browser plugin of some sort. This would remove the Ad and add users to the network, so the no censorship would be in place.

Also the visibility of the .bit domain on standard registrars, and the requirement to create them or buy them on the namecoin network, would make people aware of it's existence and it's features.

The funding of course is a problem, and those proxies should also be maintained. But it could be solved using donations, the exchange to connect standard domain registrars with namecoin or even collecting the "coins" that right now are destroyed during transactions by design (sorry, I am really new at namecoin and I might be touching a nerve or saying something stupid).

I really think having the TLD would make the project really visible.

Well, there would be some kind of system in place for the users of URLs that end in .bit, right?  And that system wouldn't break just because ICANN DNS servers start claiming the .bit TLD.  While ICANN and the registrars whine and complain (and eventually win, as you say) in an effort to get these alternative systems to stop "hijacking" the .bit TLD, the Namecoin community can easily (and probably quickly) move from .bit to .nmc or something else.

The free market eventually wins, but the tyrants usually win first.

yes... if someone is willing to pay 180k.. it doesn't matter.. it can be called .nmc or anything.. (probably can be change it in less than 30 seconds)

vote this:

http://ideabank.opendns.com/story.php?title=NameCoins_as_a_DNS_Lookup