Namecoin is alive and kicking. It has been around a bit longer
than any of the other altcoins and certainly is the most innovative coin
after Bitcoin. It was created as a separate chain to prevent bloat in
Bitcoin as per Satoshi's suggestion. Also merged mining was first
implemented in Namecoin. This means that though it is a separate chain
it improves Bitcoin security (and of course benefits).
Note that there are more possibilities in Namecoin than domain name
resolution as it is a general name/value storage system. The community
is only starting to experiment with new ideas like IDs, logins,
TLS/https, Bitmessage integration, file verification and so on.
In such a system it is necessary to have something of value: work or
coins with coins being superior. It would be interesting if the coins
were Bitcoins but it is not so easy to do and no one came up with such
an implementation so far. The NMC price floating freely has the
advantage that system fixed fees are subject to some external price
regulation.
If you have a problem that Namecoin is mostly a superset of Bitcoin's
features: better learn to deal with it, there is much more to come -
both in Namecoin and other chains.
Namecoin needs more active core developers. With Namecoin it is much
easier to make a difference than in Bitcoin so it is probably a fun
starting point for future Bitcoin developers, too.
If you don't want to go down the c++ rabbit hole there are also a lot of
possibilities to create peripheral software mostly in Java and Python
that could make an impact: Browser Plugins, split DNS resolvers on
various systems (Android), Electrum Bitcoin address ID integration, web
of trust, voting, bonds, decentralized facebook/twitter/reddit mashup....
You are welcome:
http://namecoin.infohttp://dot-bit.orghttp://dot-bit.org/forum/index.php =
http://nf.bitSo current status is - don't buy a domain from someone, and don't trust
any important key-value pair in namecoin before the fix has been rolled
out! - Will update once it is there, but could take days to deploy at
miners.
Unless you have the fixed version installed that is. BTW it's being
tested right now.
ScalabilityFor domain name resolution alone there should be much less transactions
than for a payment system like Bitcoin. We will have to see about other
applications but probably Namecoin will have to bear much less load than
Bitcoin but scale similarly.
Lite clientA lite client is possible though it may have to download all block
HEADERS and name_op TXs.
Also a very lite client is possible that only verifies that a name_op is
in a block and checks a couple of the next block headers. The name value
could have been altered later on but it would still be safer than using
a regular DNS.
While as of now running the Namecoin client does not take a lot of
computing power it would be nice to see this implemented.
OP contacted the Namecoin devs through multiple channels and gave them
over a month to respond. They never responded nor gave any indication
that a fix was being worked on.
He only contacted devs long gone. There has been quite some activity on
the forum over the last couple of months.
Still glad he made the problem public and helps us now e.g. by editing
the OP and maybe the OP title?