Namecoin's Dot Bit Domain Name Cypersquatting

[xeverse]

>> Where all those Infos e-mails come from?

Wtf is going on here? The very idea is being abused..

Is it an additional value specified upon registering and stored in the blockchain?
Mustn't it then be stripped off in order to prevent the squatting and reselling?

[crazy_rabbit]

Namecoin has basically stalled to the point of maybe no return over this issue. The developers are gone, and a huge number of domains squatted (but by all mean,s not ALL domains). I don't know, Ican was talking about a new tld called - ".bit" which was Namecoins. So....

On top of that last I checked you really had to fiddled with your DNS settings to even find .bit addresses. It's all a mess without leadership - last I checked anyway. I'm not sure if it has life now or people are just waiting for a better moment.

[doublec]

>> Where all those Infos e-mails come from?

Wtf is going on here? The very idea is being abused..

Is it an additional value specified upon registering and stored in the blockchain?
Mustn't it then be stripped off in order to prevent the squatting and reselling?

Yes, it's an additional value specified in the JSON value when registering the name. Namecoin is really a name/value datastore, with a portion of it used for domain names.

[Sunny King]

The only way I can think of fighting squatters is to raise the registration and renewal fees, but that's not very likely to happen with namecoin.

[Herodes]

Is namecoin basically a dead project then ?

[casascius]

If namecoin were turned into a name registry for onion websites, it would have a utility.

The world isn't demanding a decentralized block chain DNS solution for regular web sites, so it's fundamentally flawed in that respect.  But onion websites lack a naming system and could benefit from this.  Would be a big payoff for anyone who wanted to undertake it, NMC also has the distinction of being one of the first alt coins and the only one really recognized as having some utility beyond being a knockoff of Bitcoin with parameter changes.

[Timo Y]

There is no objective way to distinguish cybersquatting from the "legitimate" use of a domain name.  Any system that tries to prevent cybersquatting is going to need some human judge to decide whether cybersquatting is taking place or not.  Bringing back a human authority makes the system corruptible, and negates the reason that systems like bitcoin and namecoin were invented in the first place.  

In other words, there is no solution for the cybersqatting "problem". It's just something a system like namecoin has to learn to live with, just like bitcoin has to learn to live with thieves who exploit the carelessness of some users and the irreversible nature of transactions.

Mitigating measures have been suggested, such as introducing regular forced auctions of domain names into the protocol, but this would create other problems.  For example, the US government could simply snatch wikileaks.bit from wikileaks by bidding millions of dollars for the domain name, once it is force-auctioned.

Having said that, I think that if namecoin ever becomes popular, there will be fewer idle domain names than at present, because there will be systems for cybersquatters to rent out their domain names, in effect becoming their own registrars.   There is no ecomomic incentive to keep a sought-after domain name idle.
 

[deepceleron]

Is namecoin basically a dead project then ?

Namecoin is not dead. The current difficulty/hashrate is 897134. You are just looking in the wrong place.

The developers are not gone. Khal (developer), logged in here yesterday, last post in 2013 on dot-bit forum:
http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=611&p=3180#p3180

Current Linux build ver 0.3.51.00 - 2012-05-31:
http://dot-bit.org/files/namecoind/?C=M;O=D

Windows build 2012-09-25:
http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=500

Migrating to a newer code base would take a good amount of work: http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=519

"Squatting" is going to be present anytime someone sees a profit potential - you can take it as many optimistic about Namecoin.

You can pick either side of the argument:
Too squatted vs. too expensive
Too many names taken vs. nobody uses Namecoin

I pulled the number of unexpired names (all names stored in the chain, not just domains) two days ago, there were 61780 registered Namecoin names, which is not heavily squatted. If there were only 100 names, you could call it unsuccessful; if there were 100,000,000 names (dotcom), then it might be too full of names.

[FuzzyBear]

what's to stop someone forking the namecoin project and altering the code to make new .somethingelse domains? agreed it would potentially run into the same situation.. but is there anything we can learn from the namecoin experiment?

[doublec]

what's to stop someone forking the namecoin project and altering the code to make new .somethingelse domains? agreed it would potentially run into the same situation.. but is there anything we can learn from the namecoin experiment?

Namecoin doesn't really have the notion of .something. That mapping is done via other software. Namecoin just provides a way to map a name to a value stored in the blockchain. By convention names prefixed with "d/" are mapped to domain names in the real world with .bit as the TLD by various pieces of software. There's nothing to stop you from using namecoin to purchase domains with different prefixes and there are already examples of such in the blockchain.

If you wanted to immediately devalue all the squatters names you could come up with some DNS software that maps a different namecoin prefix. If your DNS translation software gets popular then that would become the defacto "namecoin domain name" system.

[deepceleron]

what's to stop someone forking the namecoin project and altering the code to make new .somethingelse domains? agreed it would potentially run into the same situation.. but is there anything we can learn from the namecoin experiment?

Domain names are simply stored as d/DOMAIN, you can put them on any TLD you choose on your own domain server. Example, look up any domain at DOMAIN.dot-bit.org

There is no domain conflict with any generic .bit top level domain anyway. Nobody paid the $185,000 to apply for such a domain.
http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/application-results/strings-1200utc-13jun12-en

[smoothie]

If namecoin were turned into a name registry for onion websites, it would have a utility.

The world isn't demanding a decentralized block chain DNS solution for regular web sites, so it's fundamentally flawed in that respect.  But onion websites lack a naming system and could benefit from this.  Would be a big payoff for anyone who wanted to undertake it, NMC also has the distinction of being one of the first alt coins and the only one really recognized as having some utility beyond being a knockoff of Bitcoin with parameter changes.

Who determines if an alt coin is "recognized"? You? No...the free market.

Based on the usage of Namecoin, the free market says that it isn't widely used.

% Volume (of total supply) trading hands is a huge factor in determining whether or not a an alt chain is "recognized".

I wouldn't say changing the hashing algorithm is changing a parameter. It fundamentally changes the mining arena in terms of block generation hardware and resistances to ASIC type hardware.

Namecoin being mergemined as well as being squatted by like 5 different people is a clear sign that namecoin can't stand on its own.

Litecoin is somewhat tied to the bitcoin price but if you watch closely slowly you can see it detaching itself.

Acceptance by merchants (goods/services) and individuals is key for something to be "recognized".

You may not know this yet but Litecoin is getting quite a bit of development on the merchant acceptance side of things behind the scenes.

The only reason you may have not heard much is because most who are developing for this aren't touting any half-baked projects until it is functional and tested. This is one huge lesson the Litecoin community has learned from bitcoin advocates' mistakes (not talking about you).

I will give you credit, where it is due, your coin project was not half-baked in my opinion. You made sure everything was ready to go before announcing it. That is awesome and good for the community as a whole. I thank you and commend you for that.

[Ryland R. Taylor-Almanza]

I don't think squatting is really that big a deal. It's annoying, but we shouldn't abandon a project over it. .com's are squatted way more than .bit's, but people still find suitable .com domains for their websites.

[smoothie]

I don't think squatting is really that big a deal. It's annoying, but we shouldn't abandon a project over it. .com's are squatted way more than .bit's, but people still find suitable .com domains for their websites.

That's not the problem.

I lost interest in the project for these reasons:

1. Merge mining of NMC

2. Lack of GUI interface

3. Domain name squatting

4. Lack of responsiveness of NMC devs (my opinion ok before you flame lol)

5. Exchange rate trading almost non-existent.

[Herodes]

deepceleron, thanks for the update.

I guess the devs are more concerned about developing than posting on forums in general.

Somehow I like this project, and it would be sad to see it go, so I am glad it's still being developed.

From what I understand, the idea was to create a decentralized dns system that no govt. could manipulate to shut down domains.

I guess if the issue with the US shutting down domains escalated, then people would be forced to look into something like namecoin.

However, for namecoin to be useful and popular, it needs to gain some traction and have some real use cases.

If not, it might forever be some obscure thing. I wonder what the devs feel about it, and what direction they think the project have.

[phelix]

[...]
 I don't know, Ican was talking about a new tld called - ".bit" which was Namecoins. So....
[...]

pictures or it never happened


>[squatting]
In the beginning the registration fees were very high and then gradually declined. It worked very well and prevented heavy squatting for several months. Devs wanted names to be very cheap to register because of other uses of namecoin.

>[devs]
I think vinced did what was required for his bounty and probably a lot more and then moved on:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2072.0

I know khal has still put a lot of work into it not too long ago and is still around.

>[merged mining]
There was no alternative for bitcoinXpress threatened to 51-attack nmc. And it was legit he did so imho.

> 5. Exchange rate trading almost non-existent.
 bitparking, btc-e...    Care to elaborate?



One big problem is that the namecoin forum is getting so little attention. So threads about NMC over here are a very good thing.


Namecoin really needs a new use case. web of trust, tor names, torrent tracker....



http://namecoin.info

http://nx.bit (http://blockchained.com/namecoin)

[doublec]

Namecoin really needs a new use case. web of trust, tor names, torrent tracker....

I posted my ideas here for storing torrent information in namecoin if you're interested.