Bitcoin Forum

SO this page http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php (http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php) is reporting that the namcoin dificulty will drop by nearly half in the next adjustment.  I know that the bitcoin difficulty dropped in it's infancy but was it this steep?

Most likely because the profitability of it compared to BTC went down, it'll probably go back up again a lot the next time.

Can someone explain how to use namecoin?

It's almost identical to bitcoin and you can use the same miners.  The only major difference right now is that the clients are daemon only.  There is not GUI interface that I have seen yet.  I am using namecoind.exe for windows which can be downloaded from the http://dot-bit.org landing page.  there are also some pages on that site discussing usage.

I noticed that bitparking.com (the only working namecoin pool) is down.  This may account for the foretasted difficulty decrease.

Free market at work. Maybe it's timing is off, maybe it's concept isn't appealing enough.. who knows.

Tons of people poured into namecoin mining when it was more profitable then btc mining. They all left with the last difficulty rise. Probably will oscillate a bit smaller and smaller as it works towards its own price/difficulty equilbrium

edit: lemonginger beat me to it.

icann just announced that you will soon be able to register any top level domains. no longer any need to "mine" .bit

http://www.icann.org/

Isn't the whole point of namecoin that your ownership/control of the domain is cryptographically secure - as secure as the blockchain.

Therefore nobody can "steal" or "confiscate" your domain?

^^ winner!

It's not dying, it's just that people are mining them and immediately selling for BTC so the price is dropping.

Seriously.  That is the reason I want just one namecoin.

I sell nice dice.  Maybe somebody would like to trade?  One set for 48 NMC?

I haven't even thought about how to price it. Make me an offer.

I welcome suggestions.

Namecoin: N974MSGhuKYaZF3JriZhCvLhcB5NTkVJ4s

https://exchange.bitparking.com

Easy way to get some namecoins.

I'm sensing some slight FUD. Are pure bitcoiners worried that Namecoin might become a strong competitor?

I love the idea of namecoin and it's possibilities.  The issue is that we can't expect it to take off until a mainstream DNS provider will resolve .bit lookups.  And what happens when someone pays the thousands to ICANN for .bit.  Then who really owns it?  We have to make the .bit tld ubiquitous or else it will fail.  I'm not saying now but eventually mainstream browsers or dns providers will have to give it legitimacy.  Who knows if they will.

/edit Typos

The idea of namecoin is intriguing.  It's just like bitcoin except you can also spend them to securely register a domain.  It's like times in the past when people used stamps as a defacto currency because they had an intrinsic value - the value of getting a letter from A to B.  Namecoin has an intrinsic value too - the value of an irrevocable domain.  

Now if nobody cares then namecoins are little more than an interesting curio.  However if they "take off" then who knows where they'll go?

Namecoin can do more than just DNS:

Of course they'll cost $185,000, and $55,000 / year.  No biggie, I have Bitcoins.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/icanns-new-top-level-domains-to-cost-185000-51354/

The problem is how do you convince the whole world to go against ICANN regulation and support .bit namecoin? My guess is it's almost impossible. So namecoin will remain an obscure experiment similar to OpenNIC

Silk Road now accepting Namecoin!

Just kidding, that will be when namecoin gets a user gui and grows up a little ... its got potential, since it is NOT bitcoin but can be traded just like them. If the schumer brigade "make bitcoin illegal" where's people gonna turn next ....
oh look, there's Namecoin just sitting waiting for a dance over there .... at this point, Namecoin is the tent peg that is conceptually holding the main pole up legally, philosophically .... whatta they gonna do ban all bitcoin-like p2p code??

If the owning vs leasing argument doesn't convince people then the very low price of registration and renewal might.

You are kidding right? namecoin also needs to be renewed, and currently it's several times more expensive than just registering a ICANN domain with godaddy.

Also the cheapest price in the world would do nothing, if the whole world don't support the protocol.

There is some steps already done to lower domain name price. Actually the price should be symbolic from the start, but speculating, rise price to much.

Several times more expensive huh? With the current rates it costs around $7.5 usd to register .bit and it will keep on getting lower. Renewal costs $0. Meanwhile godaddy costs $12 per year.

Namecoin Dying?
A few days ago there was a thread about how great it was doing.

There is a namecoin gui. http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=93&sid=302e43c8754997fc355416af00c70b28 and looks to be a wallet type gui in the works. check the posts here http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=8

well A few days ago it was at $20+, I guess it dropped in value recently.

Anyone wanna sell me a few namecoins for BTC?


 :)

Namecoin is certainly not 'dying'. In fact the development team has been very active, and activity has been picking up on the exchange. It seems to me that some people are getting nervous that all their money is in Bitcoins.

If you left all your money in Bitcoins, and walked away from a year and came back, there's a chance it could be worth 0. Not because governments made it illegal, or because more people were goxed... but because Namecoin has more features and simply made it obsolete in comparison, so it fell into disuse.

Namecoin can do everything that Bitcoin can do, and also the DNS stuff.

 I'm not clear on how namecoin pricing works, but if everyone got into namecoin, and it's value skyrocketed, wouldn't that defeat the purpose of namecoin?

Nope. The price to purchase a domain name (in namecoins) goes down the more blocks are mined over time.

You are incorrect to say that Renewal costs will go to $0. It is more like it will approach 0 NMC.

0.01 NMC in 6 to 8 months might be worth $7.50.

I don't thin namecoin is dying, if you look at the age of namecoin it is very young.
In my opinion, bitcoin and namecoin should go hand in hand.
Satoshi had this idea of "domaincoins" somewhere else.

summary:

• Namecoin is alive and well
• Namecoin is young, not even 3 months old.  The Namecoin blockchain started on 17 April 2011.  By comparison, Bitcoin blockchain started on 3 January 2009.
• Namecoin's first major application is for secure ownership of .bit domains.   Because the Namecoin system is a generic name/value datastore, there are many, many, many more applications possible.
• Namecoin currently is not documented well.  This will improve as the project matures.
• Namecoin currently has no open source GUI.  This will improve as the project matures.

The Namecoin economic system is broken, so it'll die sooner or later...

Specifically?

Umm.. How? Mind to elaborate?

(I almost flagged this post for troll... but I looks to the left... Oop! The admin!)

The biggest problem with namecoin, is the fact that is it decentralized. the transition from ICANN to NMC would be hell. communist news network says google has over 5% of all Internets traffic.

that would mean the meta backbone of the internet would be almost instantly vaporized because google does not own the google domain. and they will never be able to get it back unless all the clients were patched.

not only that but namecoins are in fact destroyed from circulation when domains are claimed.

both ICANN and NMC would have to coexist. so the .bit domain would never be anything more than a hobby domain.

edit: pile all of that on top of the moderately complicated nongui they have. no average sane person will pop open a daemon and type in commands to buy a twinkie and the chair they sit their fat ass on.

WINDOWS INTEGRATION or lack of ultimately destroys any chance it ever had. the best use for namecoins is so botnets can operate even more decentralized than they already are.

There are many problems:

- Namecoin fixes the cost of registration according to a formula for a long period of time. Price fixing is always a bad idea.
- When the price fixing ends, generators will be able to generate all of the good domain names at almost no cost. (This is better than the ICANN DNS, but it should be avoided if it can be.)
- Generators will intercept registration transactions and register the domains themselves, holding them hostage to get more money.
- Even ignoring the above two problems, domain registration will probably be too cheap. Miners don't care about how cheaply domain squatters can register domains.
- To resolve domain names by yourself, you need to download all new blocks. Blocks will grow in size, and eventually the network will become semi-centralized (as Bitcoin will). This can be avoided for resolvers if you're building a separate system, and it's one of the only reasons I see for not building onto the Bitcoin block chain.

DNS needs a lot more thought.

Thanks for your thoughts and opinions. I'll mull those over ...

PS: Shouldn't this thread be in Off-Topic also ....
"General discussion about the Bitcoin client/network/ecosystem that doesn't fit better in other categories"

I don't see Namecoin doing well.

There's a BTC/NMC exchange: https://exchange.bitparking.com/main


You are right, I expressed myself wrong. What I meant to say was that renewal doesn't have a network fee like name_firstupdate, it only has a regular transaction fee (which could be $0 if you modify the client and a miner is willing to include that transaction in a block for free).


Why is that a problem?


It is not a requirement for .bit to completely replace ICANN for it to be successful, just like Bitcoin is not required to replace all other currencies to be considered a success. Personally I consider both already a success. It may or may not become bigger than openNIC, .me, .info, or even .net and .com, but who cares? The point is it already has value to some people, so it's not a problem that it can't replace ICANN completely (I believe it can though).


Kind of a retarded argument because user-friendliness is a maturity issue, not a design issue. Also it is already way easier to browse .bit domains than you think it is. See here (https://masterpool.eu/proxy), here (http://bitname.org/) and here (http://namecoin.us/) for easy solutions.


Those are not issues that make Namecoin broken, only less than optimal. I don't see what's the big issue with squatting anyway. If people are willing to pay a high price for a domain then what's the problem? And if they are not willing then squatting is unprofitable so there'll be no motive to do it.


This is prevented by the name_new transaction which come before name_firstupdate: http://dot-bit.org/FAQ#Why_is_there_a_separate_name_new_step.3F

Another good BTC/NMC exchange is https://btcex.com/

I've read that BTCex has stolen money from its users so I wouldn't recommend it over Bitparking.

I admit I've only used Bitparking but it has been extremely reliable.

Thanks for the warning. I'd better look into that for sure.
bitparking has been great, they also have a namecoin mining pool for standard rpc bitcoin mining clients.

Just to come back to the topic: IMHO namecoin is not dead (and it's not dying either). It is a quite new project and most people that are building the first economics aroud namecoin are enthusiasts. Me for example like namecoin because it is NOT ICANN. My domainname is my property as long as i renew it. It's impossible for the US government to seize my domain. This is something that namecoins is doing quite well.

Furthermore the community is working hard to evolve the user experience. We are searching for new and easy ways to give everybody the possibility to access .bit namespace. We learned from the problems having only one mining Pool (have a look at http://namecoin.us/pools.php (http://namecoin.us/pools.php). There are some more now). There is at least one additional pool that is out of beta and is not listed. So we are well prepared for bitcoiners going for namecoins. as a matter of fact we assume that some miners will come back mining namecoins if the difficulty decreases in about one week.

Last time there was only one pool and the pool operator did everything possible to satisfy the massive amount of miners. But i guess some stopped mining due to the fact there was not enough pool capacity.

Well, I have one namecoin pool up and running and just sent a mail :).
I think namecoin won't die, the system itself is unique and it is almost wrong to compare to bitcoin.

regards, talpan