For those that understand Namecoin

[Lord T]

What is the point of it? I do not see any use for it at all yet it seems very popular.

I've looked at a few FAQs and they explain what it does but no real explaination why.

[TeraPool]

check out the official namecoin forums or the namecoin subreddit for answers to all of these questions and more.

[Rob P.]

I'll give you a quick, very high-level, run down.

1)  All domain names on the Internet are provided by registries.
2)  Those registrars control your domain name, because THEY tell the Internet which name servers to use to resolve names.
3)  Those registrars can be ordered, by their respective governments, to point the name servers to servers THEY control instead of you.
4)  When that happens, the government now controls your domain, and can take it offline.

Namecoin was created to prevent all of the above.

It's based on Bitcoin, so all of the same rules apply (peer-to-peer, transactions, miners, blocks, hashes, block chain, etc).

Namecoin, however, has some special transactions that turn it into a peer-to-peer DNS Registrar. 

So, you register a domain with Namecoin, you actually OWN that domain.  It cannot be stripped from you without your consent, because it's signed with your private keys and the information within it cannot be changed without those private keys.

It does have 1 major drawback:  There is no connection from the Namecoin TLD (.bit) to the global Internet.  So, if you host a server on a .bit address, only other people who have modified their systems to resolve .bit space will be able to get to those sites.

But, folks are working on that.

[Lord T]

Guys,

Thank you.

Rob has hit on one area I didn't understand. How it related to my existing domains. Now I know it doesn't and may never I'm a bit happier. I see it being like Bitcoin for those that don't trust the government and want to use it on a subset of the web.

I still have a few concerns but as it will not impact my current domains I don't have an issue.

Regards