Bitcoin Forum

http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/06/20/domain.names/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7

"(CNN) -- Coming soon to a website near you: dot-anything
A group charged with overseeing the development of the Internet voted Monday to relax the rules on website naming conventions -- potentially triggering a virtual domain name gold rush to rival the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.
At a meeting in Singapore, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- also known by its acronym ICANN -- approved the change to allow domain names using any combination of letters and numbers, including non-Latin characters.
"ICANN has opened the Internet's naming system to unleash the global human imagination," said Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of ICANN. "We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind."
In past years, there have been requests for new top level domains such as .kids, .shop, .nyc and -- for porn sites -- .xxx.
The group said "strong efforts were made to address the concerns of all interested parties, and to ensure that the security, stability and resiliency of the Internet are not compromised.""

I'm pretty sure this increases the chance we will see .bit domains that just work.. What do you guys think?

Namecoin helps the stability of Bitcoin lets not forget that!

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Wow that would be great news indeed!

That's interesting news. How would namecoin go on about making .bit domains accessible to everyone, though?

Currently you need to set a custom DNS which is gibberish to the average Joe and 99.9% of people. People will definitely like the fact they can't be revoked, stolen or hijacked, but if you can't just type it in the browser bar as you would .com, .net, .org etc..
It wont be much of a hit product.

"We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind."

SEXIST !!!

uh ???

It's a joke for the PC (politically correct) minded.

You're supposed to say human kind these days :)

It was just a typo.  He meant to say mankind.

"Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself: "Mank ind". Basically, it's made up of two separate words- "mank" and "ind". What do these words mean ? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind." -- Jack Handy

heh that one was over my head Chucksta

LOL, excellent


Yeah, I was thinking that not many peeps would have gotten or understood that :)

I was expecting a bit of a flame about the political correct view being too excessive :)

Note that a root domain is planned to cost $200k...

Of course, this news just means that someone can go buy the .bit domain and screw every namecoin domain owner. They will probably charge you for your domains, and probably NOT in namecoins.

Yes, this will happen next year, and yes, someone would have to put up a 200k$ bill to do that, but why not? Think of who would want this domain. Cisco comes to mind.

Good luck then trying to prove that you are already using it with a distributed P2P architecture when the root nameservers start hosting the "official" .bit zone.

".bit" is not set in stone, Namecoin can use a different TLD if needed. In fact, it could use several simultaneously. The TLD is not included in the names you register with Namecoin, it's just a resolver thing.

can anyone explain what namecoin is in a way that a simple person like me can understand  ::)

Foo, you are correct in what you say, but if people and websites are going to actually use the .bit TLD, then what are you going to do if someone goes and buys it from ICANN?

Tell everyone "please inform all your clients and your partners and everyone who has ever visited your .bit website that as from today your website address DNS postfix will be .bit7 instead of .bit" ?

Having one TLD only for namecoin DNS would be practical, because it could become widely known and used in the future. But now it is at the mercy of the ICANN.

It's not practical at all. This decision by ICANN in my view means that nobody can ever have their own guaranteed domain name, unless of course they are willing to pay the price for it. Thus the argument that "if you buy a domain with namecoins YOU OWN IT" is not really valid anymore.

I do hope however that I am overly pessimistic about it and that the community will find a workaround. I can't think of any at the moment.

namecoin is not compatible with the ICANN DNS system, so why does it matter? ICANN can't regulate namecoin. There could be a ICANN version of .bit domain

I would like to share your optimism, and I do understand what you are saying, but aren't we doing it to get people using it in the end?

Namecoin.us is an excellent initiative, which could be the basis of this, but how would we deal with a "hijacked" purchased from ICANN TLD? Should we ask people to change their DNS servers whenever they want to access our namecoin-based domain? Change their hosts file every time? Go to namecoin.us to access it? Or install a Firefox extension just for this?

It just won't work, apart from marginal users, outlaws, hackers, etc. I got no problem with this (I actually got my first job at a university after hacking their mail server 15 years ago) but you can't expect wide adoption this way.

I'm sure someone will buy the .bit domain but the cost is so high it'll probably be a large company who doesn't care about bitcoin/namecoin miners. Namecoin should probably adopt a TLD that ICANN would never approve like .fuck or something  ;)

One small step for man...

U.S. Relinquishes Control of Internet Shortly after Discussion of Bitcoin and Namecoin in Draft ICANN Report
https://medium.com/p/bcc623b7605a

could this affect namecoin price in your opinion?