At the current moment the namecoin block chain has 18,247 blocks that have been generated. Total namecoins that have been mined is 912,350 NMC of which 67,255.83 (
http://explorer.dot-bit.org/) have been destroyed due to domain name registration on the TLD .bit. At the very most there currently exists 845,094.17 assuming no namecoins have been lost due to a corrupt wallet file etc, etc, etc.
The current exchange rate is 0.0292 BTC / 1 NMC (
https://exchange.bitparking.com/main).
This implies that the entire namecoin market is approximately the equivalent of:
845097.17 NMC * 0.0292 BTC/NMC = 24,676.74 BTC
Essentially one early adopter of BTC could buy up the majority of the namecoins with close to 25k bitcoins (assuming the price doesn't move much which is not likely).
The market cap of the namecoin market at this moment is:
24,676.74 BTC * $14.02 /BTC = $345,968.03
Each namecoin is worth:
$14.02 * 0.0292 BTC/NMC = $0.409384
With the merged mining update (
http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=217&sid=3d4f20064f7f1e7239072284a5b4e901) and domain cost decrease by 4 times after block 24,000 on the horizon (
http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=151&start=10), are we looking at a ticking time bomb on the namecoin market?
Also note that domain cost will be 0.01 NMC before the end of the year very likely with the merged mining and updates at block 24,000.
Thoughts welcome...