[announce] Namecoin - a distributed naming system based on Bitcoin

[DesktopCommando]

Are there any namecoins about - I would like to offer an exchange listing of sorts (for free) however need a namecoin to test it.

**edited to add - got some on c-patex**

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[wavessurfing]

Today Namecoin celebrates its 10th anniversary! On Sunday, April 17, 2011 at 00:26:41 (GMT/UTC), the Genesis block (block 0) was generated - and the very first fork of Bitcoin and thus the world's first alternative cryptocurrency was born! Namecoin, along with Bitcoin, was and is primarily intended as an alternative Domain Name System (DNS) for websites, with the goal of becoming independent of regular ICANN domains with Top Level Domains (TLD) such as .com, .net or .org.

As a key/value store, Namecoin allows any record on the blockchain such as identities and whatever data up to a size of 255 bytes for the key (255 ASCII characters such as numbers and letters, i.e. the name of the record like a domain name) and additional 520 bytes for the value (520 ASCII characters, e.g. the DNS configuration of a domain). So in total a key/value pair can contain 775 bytes or 775 ASCII characters (see record with TxID b5a1d922cb66299ced3856b8b112201f798b81dee31a4483e935f43866bb5554 as an example).

Today, Saturday, April 17, 2021 at 00:30:02 (GMT/UTC) we mined block 554960. So including the Genesis block, we got 554,961 confirmations of block 0. During these 10 years, a total of 5,584,201 TxIDs (transactions) were written to the blockchain, including the so-called Coinbase transactions for newly mined blocks that credit the miner's wallet with the reward. Subtracting the Coinbase transactions, 5,029,240 TxIDs were issued, so 5 million transactions for transferring coins and creating and updating names. On average, these are 10 TxIDs per block including the Coinbase transactions (or 9 TxIDs per block excluding the Coinbase transactions) and 152 blocks per day over the last 10 years.

happy birthday !

[benzi]

Soo Namecoin code in sync with bitcoin core

https://twitter.com/XAYA_tech/status/1389189769071104010

Hash rate - BTC Around 180 EH, NMC Around 120 EH

BTC $56,000 and Namecoin $2.20

Need I say more  

[ry474k3]

The ironic thing is if namecoin was only a regular shitcoin instead of a utility coin it would probably be priced at about 1000 dollars with muppets knocking each other over to get in to "invest" while elon tweets shit about it being the next big thang. Crypto market is the scammiest most brain drained swamp on the face of this god forsaken earth and deserves to crash and burn without any mercy shown to it.

[biolizard89]

NLnet Foundation and European Commission have awarded 50k EUR to Namecoin developers Yanmaani and Ahmed Bodiwala for Namecoin Core and Electrum-NMC development, as part of the Next Generation Internet Zero: Search and Discovery Fund.  Huge thanks to the awesome people at NLnet and European Commission!  https://www.namecoin.org/2021/04/30/funding-from-nlnet.html

Also, for those of you accessing Namecoin's IRC channels via Freenode, please be advised that Freenode is currently undergoing a hostile takeover by London Trust Media Holdings.  We recommend that you abandon the Freenode ship immediately and switch to Hackint.  https://www.namecoin.org/2021/05/19/freenode-hostile-takeover.html

[BayAreaCoins]

NLnet Foundation and European Commission have awarded 50k EUR to Namecoin developers Yanmaani and Ahmed Bodiwala for Namecoin Core and Electrum-NMC development, as part of the Next Generation Internet Zero: Search and Discovery Fund.  Huge thanks to the awesome people at NLnet and European Commission!  https://www.namecoin.org/2021/04/30/funding-from-nlnet.html

Also, for those of you accessing Namecoin's IRC channels via Freenode, please be advised that Freenode is currently undergoing a hostile takeover by London Trust Media Holdings.  We recommend that you abandon the Freenode ship immediately and switch to Hackint.  https://www.namecoin.org/2021/05/19/freenode-hostile-takeover.html

London Trust Media = Private Internet Access?

I remember when they sponsored these forums many moons ago.

[benzi]

Looks like newbies are catching on...

https://twitter.com/storycomic1/status/1399139479265284096

[vane91]

you guys should take your grudges everywhere else instead of staining an epic thread.

could everyone focus for a second on the topic at hand, namely, Namecoin

and discuss how the chinese are even copying the .bit domain extension when they launched their own token naming service... ---> https://twitter.com/RBCHI/status/1402230670915604486

shouldn't we, when they finish, just copy their features or something.?

NMC should have at least pretty interfaces for normal people to be able to use it...

[Trade Runner]

you guys should take your grudges everywhere else instead of staining an epic thread.

The notification about the new IRC channel was not caused by any Namecoin-related internal conflict. Anyway, regarding our internal conflicts I tried to find a solution and even offered in a chat with the contributor yanmaani to bury the hatchet with "Jeremy Rand" aka biolizard89 for the case of his public excuse for his repeated misconduct - with the result that he fully sided with J.R. and even adopted his manner 1:1. As a result, I finally banned yanmaani from the IRC channel. The question of a fork came up again in one of our Telegram groups. By the way, the reason for this conflict is also the same reason why the Namecoin project is considered dead from the outside.

and discuss how the chinese are even copying the .bit domain extension when they launched their own token naming service... ---> https://twitter.com/RBCHI/status/1402230670915604486

About the TLD .bit we had it earlier. There wouldn't be a problem registering the .bit TDL even in the regular ICANN namespace. It's just a question how the browser plugins etc are handling the DNS resolution. This Chinese project can take and copy which pseudo TLD ever, it won't affect Namecoin and it's usability in any way. That Namecoin is not really user friendly is well known and I regularly even get requests on Telegram how to get the Core node connected as no peers are found for days. Only after manually adding several peers the synchronization starts. But in the end, Namecoin is indeed epic and the most established blockchain DNS service, secured over the Bitcoin network, see e.g. the notification 🎊 10 years Namecoin 🎉 for details.

[Trade Runner]

As we have uncovered, the Namecoin contributors on GitHub, namely and most notably Daniel Kraft, Jeremy Rand, and the user under the pseudonym yanmaani, received an airdrop of 10.2 million HNS in February 2020, according to Handshake's whitepaper. We need to clarify here that most of the listed contributors, and thus the members with the most contributions such as laanwj, MarcoFalke and sipa, have never contributed a single line of code directly to Namecoin. For example, since the Namecoin Core wallet is forked and regularly imported from the Bitcoin Core repository, the original contributions to the Bitcoin Core wallet are automatically shown in the Namecoin fork as well, without these contributors even knowing it. The members active exclusively on the Namecoin repository can be found e.g. in the open issues.

The huge airdrop for the Namecoin contributors was sent to the Handshake multisig address hs1qme9hk473uwkgk8293pyjea2dysrrweedk3jfcdnmzey432ctl06q4nk370. This airdrop was intended as a personal donation to active and previous Namecoin contributors and has been spent on February 20, 2020 at block 2872, worth approximately $1 million USD at the time of the airdrop. In order to obtain this airdrop, the Namecoin contributors had to apply for the pseudo TLD (top level domain) .bit within the Handshake network with the DNSSEC proof of ownership of the subdomain bit.namecoin.org. The claim was then made with the TxID 4cf79769efba09e0eb1ed446f8d8200579fd67967eb9252b834475eb5c2878a9, which was symbolically rewarded with 503 HNS (in addition to the airdrop of 10.2 million HNS).

Referring to the news section on namecoin.org (see also the current Wayback archive), this airdrop has never been publicly declared by the Namecoin contributors, nor was it ever declared how the airdrop was split and who received which amount. For further details, see the discussion in the Handshake Telegram group. By the way, recently we had a very nice discussion with J.R. & Co....  

[PeterColumboFalk]

Another trustworthy exchange for Namecoin is https://freiexchange.com. I use it for years without issues. The only drawback is no disposable deposit adresses.

[benzi]

I'm getting 2013 silk road vibes.......

https://twitter.com/Namecoin/status/1407536412023525379

Allegedly or not if this starts a snowball effect in the near future, then better get those cheap Namecoins while you can because ohh baby

The many that complained how they wished they bought bitcoin at a dollar, Well here is your second chance..

https://giphy.com/gifs/TFYyfFrqxuExEM5r04

[biolizard89]

NLnet Foundation and European Commission have awarded 50k EUR to Namecoin developers Yanmaani and Ahmed Bodiwala for Namecoin Core and Electrum-NMC development, as part of the Next Generation Internet Zero: Search and Discovery Fund.  Huge thanks to the awesome people at NLnet and European Commission!  https://www.namecoin.org/2021/04/30/funding-from-nlnet.html

Also, for those of you accessing Namecoin's IRC channels via Freenode, please be advised that Freenode is currently undergoing a hostile takeover by London Trust Media Holdings.  We recommend that you abandon the Freenode ship immediately and switch to Hackint.  https://www.namecoin.org/2021/05/19/freenode-hostile-takeover.html

London Trust Media = Private Internet Access?

I remember when they sponsored these forums many moons ago.

Yep.  Specifically Andrew "rasengan" Lee.  (There seems to be some dispute over whether London Trust Media Holdings was involved in Andrew's takeover of Freenode; looks like Andrew may have sold some companies to an Israeli malware company prior to this takeover.)  The same Andrew "rasengan" Lee who was an active participant in scamming Alexandra Elbakyan earlier this year.  I hope he's not expecting his investment in Handshake (which donated an airdrop to us) to induce us to cover for him on this; not gonna happen.  (Note: this is not the same Andrew Lee who works for Purse.io and who was a Handshake developer; that Andrew Lee is actually a quite nice guy AFAICT.)

Meanwhile, we've released ncdns v0.2.  This release features layer-2 TLS, and major overhauls to the build system.  https://www.namecoin.org/2021/06/28/ncdns-v0.2-released.html

Also, our awesome friends at XMR.RU translated our 36C3 talks into Russian.  They also provided English transcripts.  https://www.namecoin.org/2020/01/11/36c3-summary.html

[nisakhairun]

is this really a healthy coin, because there are so many in this decade with the launch of coins that are not healthy and also of poor quality

[sun.king]

After this DOGE explosion then folks would catch on to AUX pow.  Right?

NMC, UNO, ix, i0, xmy

[hornetsnest]

After this DOGE explosion then folks would catch on to AUX pow.  Right?

NMC, UNO, ix, i0, xmy

Are you any relation to the mighty Sunny King? .asking for a friend

[Trade Runner]

To get Namecoin finally back to life, I've created a new Namecoin website at namecoin.pro. Furthermore, I coded two browser add-ons for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox for the blockchain domain resolution, which I'll submit to the Google and Mozilla code review shortly. In the meantime, you may take a look at the screen-captures out of the video intro:

[Trade Runner]

Recently we had a very nice discussion on Wikipedia about whether or not the newly created website at namecoin.pro should be used as a reference (after the Namecoin article has been blighted for over six years with a "multiple issue box" about missing sources and so on). One of the contributors around domob and biolizard89 appeared as IP, claiming "The added namecoin.pro links are spam and not relevant". Very revealing his statement "the imprint lists one "Uwe Martens", who is not a contributor to or otherwise involved with Namecoin". Why I can't help feeling again a déjà-vu?

Info: About the actual situation of the Namecoin project please see this summary!

Correction: For the personal view about the situation of the Namecoin project by someone who's not been involved in the project/community so far, see that link.

Very interesting again the proof why the concept of Wikipedia failed: an editor named "David Gerard", who regularly edited the article, reverted the edits and protected the article in his version with his extended rights as admin (which is not a sys-op, but just a simple moderator). The section Violation of WP:UNINVOLVED stucks and it seems that this behavior, normally considered a violation of their rules, is accepted in this case (because for the user "David Gerard", a hobby blogger about crypto stuff, special rules apply). While I don't care any longer about Wikipedia and its failed concept, I care much more about the Namecoin contributor who appeared anonymously. This made me think about another nice notification of the last time:

As we have uncovered, the Namecoin contributors on GitHub, namely and most notably Daniel Kraft, Jeremy Rand, and the user under the pseudonym yanmaani, received an airdrop of 10.2 million HNS in February 2020, according to Handshake's whitepaper. We need to clarify here that most of the listed contributors, and thus the members with the most contributions such as laanwj, MarcoFalke and sipa, have never contributed a single line of code directly to Namecoin. For example, since the Namecoin Core wallet is forked and regularly imported from the Bitcoin Core repository, the original contributions to the Bitcoin Core wallet are automatically shown in the Namecoin fork as well, without these contributors even knowing it. The members active exclusively on the Namecoin repository can be found e.g. in the open issues.

The huge airdrop for the Namecoin contributors was sent to the Handshake multisig address hs1qme9hk473uwkgk8293pyjea2dysrrweedk3jfcdnmzey432ctl06q4nk370. This airdrop was intended as a personal donation to active and previous Namecoin contributors and has been spent on February 20, 2020 at block 2872, worth approximately $1 million USD at the time of the airdrop. In order to obtain this airdrop, the Namecoin contributors had to apply for the pseudo TLD (top level domain) .bit within the Handshake network with the DNSSEC proof of ownership of the subdomain bit.namecoin.org. The claim was then made with the TxID 4cf79769efba09e0eb1ed446f8d8200579fd67967eb9252b834475eb5c2878a9, which was symbolically rewarded with 503 HNS (in addition to the airdrop of 10.2 million HNS).

Referring to the news section on namecoin.org (see also the current Wayback archive), this airdrop has never been publicly declared by the Namecoin contributors, nor was it ever declared how the airdrop was split and who received which amount. For further details, see the discussion in the Handshake Telegram group. By the way, recently we had a very nice discussion with J.R. & Co....  

Well, this time I thought it might be really time to discuss with a broader audience "who has been involved in the project/community so far", who will be involved in the future, and who will not:

To:  
  
NLnet Foundation
Science Park 400  
1098 XH Amsterdam  
Netherlands  
bureau@nlnet.nl
  
Mr. Joost Agterhoek, xxxx@nlnet.nl  
Mr. Bob Goudriaan, xxxx@nlnet.nl  
Mr. Michiel Leenaars, xxxx@nlnet.nl  
Mrs. Hanneke Slager c/o Cordemeyer & Slager / Advocaten B.V., xxxx@xxxx.nl


Next Generation Internet initiative (NGI)
info@ngi.eu
  
European Commission  
Department Next-Generation Internet (CNECT.E.3)
Mr. Olivier Bringer  
Beaulieulaan 33  
1160 Brussel  
Belgium  
cnect-e3@ec.europa.eu
  
  
Review of a donation by NLnet to the Namecoin project in May 2021
  
  
  
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,  
  
in the name and on behalf of the Namecoin community (i.a. Telegram group @Namecoin, currently around 820 active members) I hereby request the review of a donation by NLnet to the Namecoin project in May 2021.  
  
Recently Jeremy Rand posted online on his personal blog at namecoin.org that NLnet funded the Namecoin project in May 2021 with 50,000 Euro, taken out of the funds of the European Commission. In the meantime, we revealed that these same Namecoin contributors received a faucet, a kind of airdrop, from the Handshake project back in February 2020, worth approximately $1 million USD at the time of the airdrop, currently around 2.2 million USD. This airdrop was intended to encourage the development of the Namecoin project. On February 20, 2020 this donation has been split among undefined and unknown recipients and has nowhere been publicly declared from the Namecoin contributors.

Therefore we kindly ask

1. if this kind of donation in February 2020 has been brought to your attention during the application for a public fund through NLnet,

2. if NLnet would still have approved the application in case of point 1,

3. whether NLnet would subsume the concealment of the Handshake donation and thus the deliberate untruthful pretense of financing worthiness under the criminal offense of subsidy fraud under the jurisdiction of all eligible nations.

In case of point 3 is fulfilled, we request:

1. that the subsidies granted will be reclaimed,

2. to file a criminal complaint for subsidy fraud in the jurisdiction of the applicant(s),

3. to decline any future requests for donation.

Independent from the legal assessment we kindly request a public declaration which amount has been sent to which recipient. For details and proofs on the Handshake blockchain please see the appendix. In the Telegram channel @namecoin_online of our connected Namecoin blockchain explorer you get further documents and all info regarding the general situation of the Namecoin project. Of particular note, the website at namecoin.org has turned out to be Jeremy Rand's personal blog, especially after he arbitrarily deleted the Namecoin wiki without consulting the other contributors first. Our new website at namecoin.pro replaces this deleted wiki and provides now the absolute “how to” basics along with two browser add-ons for .bit blockchain domain resolution.

Kind regards,  
signed,  
Uwe Martens  
September 16, 2021  
  
  
  
Appendix: Links to the relevant groups and websites  
__________________________________  
  
Uwe Martens  
Email: xxxx@namecoin.pro  
Web: www.namecoin.pro  
Telegram: @Uwe_Martens  

• Project site of the NLnet Foundation:

Namecoin: ZeroNet and Packaging

https://nlnet.nl/project/Namecoin-ZeroNet/

WayBack:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210127230928/https:/nlnet.nl/project/Namecoin-ZeroNet/

• Announcements by Jeremy Rand:

Funding from NLnet (project site of Jeremy Rand):

https://www.namecoin.org/2021/04/30/funding-from-nlnet.html

WayBack:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210618052747/https:/www.namecoin.org/2021/04/30/funding-from-nlnet.html

Twitter announcement (account maintained by Jeremy Rand):

https://twitter.com/Namecoin/status/1395373241699422214

WayBack:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210618053637/https:/twitter.com/Namecoin/status/1395373241699422214

Announcement on Bitcointalk (by biolizard89):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6017.msg57045417#msg57045417

WayBack:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210613081342/https:/bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6017.1900

• Notifications by Uwe Martens and Michael Cook:

Notification on Bitcointalk (by The Scam Removers aka Trade Runner):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6017.msg57222123#msg57222123

WayBack:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210613081342/https:/bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6017.1900

Notifications on Telegram (Channel @namecoin_online):

https://t.me/s/namecoin_online

It could have been so simple. But now we do it my way. All other previous funders will be informed shortly as well.

I'll be back!

[Abcdefghijklmnzzz]

Obviously something big going on behind the scenes with a lot of money.

This person makes an interesting point. Alternatives to centralized dns need to be simple, and maybe usernames would appeal to people.

https://aaronparecki.com/2020/09/24/21/

https://nameid.org/

Have any of the Namecoin camps, either the main group or Trade Runner, been in contact with this lady?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16985666/alexandra-elbakyan-sci-hub-open-access-science-papers-lawsuit

She seems to have dealt with hns

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/01/14/sci-hub-leaves-handshake-blockchain-after-2-days-citing-centralization-concerns/

Her project would be the best to help remove politics from the internet.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/8/22220738/twitter-sci-hub-suspended-indian-court-case

And she would help split the 'dns' argument into smart people vs stupid people so things could move along faster.

[domob]

Everyone who knows me knows that I don't want to get involved in any politics and just want to develop tech.  But let me clarify two things:  First, I've not been involved in any edits of the Namecoin wikipedia page in at least the last year or two; I am contributing to Wikipedia only under my typical username "domob".  Second, I have personally not received any of the Handshake funds and won't in the forseeable future either.