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

[biolizard89]

My point was that if people use their hashing power to mine both btc and nmc then you probably have some heavyweights using computing power that an individual cannot compete with realistically.

Well yeah, we care more about security for the naming system than we do about making it easy for a small miner to solo-mine blocks. We *are* interested in improving the ability to pool-mine Namecoin (since that does affect security of the naming system), and we've worked with Luke Dashjr and Matt Corallo on draft specs for this, but for now it's an active research area and would require a hardfork (a contentious one, no less, unless some technical objections are solved).

Some coins use to split algorithms e.g. huc, xmy, dgb etc to force some fairness in mining and add security, but maybe the heavyweight miners i.e., btc merge miners adds something too, maybe security.

I just checked the Huntercoin specs and it accepts two parent PoW types: Bitcoin style and Litecoin style. Litecoin's PoW is a joke that no cryptographer would ever want to go near. Maybe that's OK for Huntercoin's threat model (no state actor is going to try to take over the Huntercoin blockchain) but it's not going to fly here. I also question whether Litecoin's hashrate is nearly high enough for it to provide meaningful AuxPoW security to its sidechains to begin with (even if we accepted the dubious proposition that stuffing a memory-hard key derivation function into Hashcash can be called a "PoW"), but I haven't looked.

[PrimeHunter2023]

My point was that if people use their hashing power to mine both btc and nmc then you probably have some heavyweights using computing power that an individual cannot compete with realistically.

Well yeah, we care more about security for the naming system than we do about making it easy for a small miner to solo-mine blocks. We *are* interested in improving the ability to pool-mine Namecoin (since that does affect security of the naming system), and we've worked with Luke Dashjr and Matt Corallo on draft specs for this, but for now it's an active research area and would require a hardfork (a contentious one, no less, unless some technical objections are solved).

70% of the last 1000 mined blocks went to this address
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/nmc/address.dws?nc1q2ml905jv7gx0d8z5f7kl23af0vtrjk4j0llmwr.htm
which has 102k nmc.
That address doesn't look like a normal pool, their last outgoing transaction was 150k, and before that 100k.

Again, not as bad as bitcoin overall, but I don't even know how to address the cavalier attitude toward that kind of thing.

Another point you touch on "security of naming system" // Security in a currency, and its derivatives in this case, comes mostly from support from users.

For example the usd is threatened, more than anything, by Washington's heavy handedness. Reckless spending could be solved but not when the dollar is being used as a blunt object against weak countries. At this point any ethical u.s. citizen supports the end of the dollar.

Namecoin devs have to decide if they want to collapse as an oligarchy, or if they want to create a genuinely useful product, even at the expense of some of their glory....For example, one of many, as mentioned before, a simple clone/fork feature that lets any group breakaway at will.

Some coins use to split algorithms e.g. huc, xmy, dgb etc to force some fairness in mining and add security, but maybe the heavyweight miners i.e., btc merge miners adds something too, maybe security.

I just checked the Huntercoin specs and it accepts two parent PoW types: Bitcoin style and Litecoin style. Litecoin's PoW is a joke that no cryptographer would ever want to go near. Maybe that's OK for Huntercoin's threat model (no state actor is going to try to take over the Huntercoin blockchain) but it's not going to fly here. I also question whether Litecoin's hashrate is nearly high enough for it to provide meaningful AuxPoW security to its sidechains to begin with (even if we accepted the dubious proposition that stuffing a memory-hard key derivation function into Hashcash can be called a "PoW"), but I haven't looked.

If you want to have a cryptography discussion, I'm ready.

But it's not about 'state actors'. There are several countries that can empty any crypto wallet.

It's about the random people who see a coin they like and want to mine it but are not interested in selling their wife to slave traders so they can afford mining gear.

Some small guy likes namecoin? The message is "Come back when you have money".

Would you like to have a discussion on this thread about cryptography as it relates to cryptocurrency?

[PrimeHunter2023]

Edit  to add /

Just for the heck of it, a simple roadmap that could easily lead to namecoin being the #1crypto

All of the top cryptos today are top mainly because of scamminess. I'm not aware of any $1b+ market cap coin that is mostly legitimate.

Namecoin is one of the only coins that could grow quickly without adding more scamminess.

Bitcoin is mostly hype and scam, but at a few points in its history it had substantive uses that grew it. Maybe ten years ago there were taskwork sites that paid people in bitcoin to do simple tasks. I spent hours a day on that and it gave me cash. A lot of other people the same. That was one of bitcoin's few legitimate currency moments.

Step 1) Implement clone/fork feature.

Step 2) Pay a namecoin person to create namecoin forks for various social groups. In other words groups that would actually want and benefit from a closed internet and economy. This step might cost a few thousand dollars to start until the endpoint was reached i.e., free publicity through word of mouth and free news.

Step 3) Partner with Xaya/Chi to create taskwork coins based on developing narrow sciences with the work limited to those in a specific economy.

There is an important German concept of worldview or weltanschauung. Groups of similar people, on their own, develop sciences that are completely mysterious to other groups. When the group no longer has isolation/space to develop then their sciences consolidate and decay. They become "useful" to a larger group e.g. 'melting pot', but any further development is trivial.

AI is considered the modern ".com" because it has become such a profitable investment.

But the truth is that what is sold to the public as "AI" is globalist horseshit. Several experts in AI have tried to steer things in the proper direction, including at least one Eastern European cryptocurrency, but have failed.

Is it important to derail the current AI fraud and legitimize real AI as a science tool? It would need a lengthy discussion, but it is important, and the stakes are high.

Step 4) As long as there is a small but significant collective of groups using taskwork AI i.e., nmc + a huc style "human mining" then the corporate AI stupidity will dissolve on its own. There is no comparison of relative strength between the two systems.

Aside from that, if a person does not like steps 3 and 4, a person should look at what is happening to Europe.

The notion of federating groups has been widely studied.

The fake federation "European Community" was not arranged by an expert to succeed. It was carefully designed to fail, to descend into an authoritarian centralized blob.

There are not many viable escape paths for Europe, but namecoin style internets/economies would give people breathing room when things begin to decay.

There are certainly corporate or "globalist" actors who do not want free groups outside the control of the blob.

There is no single corporation or group or affinity that is causing this misguidance. "Colonizers" are often blamed, as are specific groups like Jews.

A good anti globalist film is Europa the Last Battle. 50 years ago, as a boy in Hebrew school, I would have called every point in the film anti semitic trash. Today I'm one of many Jews promoting the film.

Namecoin has powerful enemies, and it isn't a magic bullet, but it could be an important coin.

~

One important point about that movie is that it unfortunately picks on Jews, because we typically are no good at defending our interests sensibly. The exact same globalist point could be made in a film about British globalists, French globalists, etc. Problem is that globalist  gangsters in those groups are not as clumsy.

An honest version of Europa TLB would apportion responsibility more sensibly, accurately.

[PrimeHunter2023]

Another thing missing from recent discussion is the first step in getting non namecoin people to benefit from .bit sites.

You say to a person "There is an alternate internet you can use in parallel with icann".

And they say "What's on it?"

And you say "Well, right now 30 websites by fringe types ranting. For any typical internet thing, news, apps, music, commercial sites, etc you have to use icann".

There has never been a tangible product or service that would attract new people, aside from abstract notions about decentralization.

If namecoin had an infrastructure like dnt / District0x / https://district0x.io/ any group could drop not just a web and economy, but a range of things into their system.

Also something like that would attract more developers.

District0x is an abstraction with no central location, with a toxic focus on 'governance', and it's floundering, but if the general idea were added to namecoin it would improve.

The bottom line though is that most people join an economy for the money.

Namecoin generates money....which it feeds to whales.

There must be a solution? A way to use a large coins / e.g. btc / hashrate to secure things without letting that utility become a way for well off people to feed only themselves.

Huntercoin had a similar problem. A brilliant idea but it benefited only a few, and those few could not relinquish their monopoly on the benefit. Or maybe the technical challenges were hard in that case.

I do not have the resources to do much, a negative net worth, no dev skills, and I am not even in the top 500 nmc holders, but there should be people, whales, who will risk a little of what they have to break namecoin's inertia.

It sort of has the tone of an exclusive low budget club with an aristocracy who want to preserve the status quo.

[biolizard89]

OK so I read through the above posts 3 times and I still can't tell what concrete thing you are proposing. I see various rants about politics (not the kind of politics that Namecoin pertains to), but nothing about naming (which is what we do). I also can't tell who you are claiming constitutes an "oligarchy"/"aristocracy" in Namecoin (...the miners? ...the devs? ...random users on Reddit and Matrix?).

Regarding your claim that (I guess?) a single pool has 70% of hashrate, that's not what Metrics says. As of Aug 1, the largest pool is Antpool with less than 42% hashrate. https://metrics.namecoin.org/namecoin/period-timestamps-14-days/pool/charts/latest.txt

Namecoin is, generally speaking, not a vehicle for testing experimental blockchain features. To the extent that we do scientific research, it's mostly in layer 2, and occasionally on-chain only for things that are critically required for the naming system to work.

If you think it's "cavalier" that the Namecoin community wants to be a naming system as opposed to an economics experiment, I'm not really sure what to say. *shrug*

[PrimeHunter2023]

OK so I read through the above posts 3 times and I still can't tell what concrete thing you are proposing. I see various rants about politics (not the kind of politics that Namecoin pertains to), but nothing about naming (which is what we do). I also can't tell who you are claiming constitutes an "oligarchy"/"aristocracy" in Namecoin (...the miners? ...the devs? ...random users on Reddit and Matrix?).

Why don't you tell me specifically which political issue/rant does not pertain to nmc, in your view, and I'll explain why it does, in my view.

Naming is one aspect of nmc. It would be more accurate to say it is a tool that creates an economy and a naming system together.

ol·i·gar·chy
/ˈäləˌɡärkē/
noun
a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution.


ar·is·toc·ra·cy
/ˌerəˈstäkrəsē/
noun
the highest class in certain societies, especially those holding hereditary titles or offices.
"the ancient Polish aristocracy had hereditary right to elect the king"

No different than most crypto, namecoin has a core group, including developers who volunteer their work. But as with most crypto that generousity is based on newcomers paying homage to the established group.

Regarding your claim that (I guess?) a single pool has 70% of hashrate, that's not what Metrics says. As of Aug 1, the largest pool is Antpool with less than 42% hashrate. https://metrics.namecoin.org/namecoin/period-timestamps-14-days/pool/charts/latest.txt

Yes, Right now it is 41%.

https://chainz.cryptoid.info/nmc/#!extraction

Namecoin is, generally speaking, not a vehicle for testing experimental blockchain features. To the extent that we do scientific research, it's mostly in layer 2, and occasionally on-chain only for things that are critically required for the naming system to work.

How can you say "Namecoin is, generally speaking, not...."

So you volunteer as a namecoin dev and that gives you a uniform and decorations?

You have a firm construct in your mind of what suits you, what namecoin should be, and 'volunteering' lets you take your power out and exercise it.

You are generous to volunteer, but your motives are murky, same as me and anybody else. I'll be careful not to poach deer in your kingdom.

If you think it's "cavalier" that the Namecoin community wants to be a naming system as opposed to an economics experiment, I'm not really sure what to say. *shrug*

Uhm, what???

Here is the quote you are abusing.

70% of the last 1000 mined blocks went to this address
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/nmc/address.dws?nc1q2ml905jv7gx0d8z5f7kl23af0vtrjk4j0llmwr.htm
which has 102k nmc.
That address doesn't look like a normal pool, their last outgoing transaction was 150k, and before that 100k.

Again, not as bad as bitcoin overall, but I don't even know how to address the cavalier attitude toward that kind of thing.

Obviously nmc includes a naming system.

Is catering only to bigger miners also inherent to it? Should a decentralized economy be built on feeding crypto whales? Most people either leave crypto, because of this cavalier attitude towards obliging poorer people to feed richer people, or they submit. I don't know how to address that, what to say. It's the norm in crypto.

~

ETA

Sorry if it sounds rude, but when a person's strength is their weakness it should be pointed out.

The core foundation of crypto today is the notion that developers are the kings and the peons must respect that.

What if you went to a mechanic and he said he would not fix your car unless you paint the car his favorite color? Should mechanics do that, just because they can get away with it?


Error reason: Happy Eyeballs MITM Failure
Error code: CF_HAPPY_EYEBALLS_MITM_FAILURE

[biolizard89]

Bullshit is an inverse PoW function, so I'm not going to comment on whatever the heck the above is. With one brief exception: everyone already knows my motives for being a cypherpunk developer; there's no murkiness there; it's literally stated on my personal website. I wish you luck finding a blockchain that's designed to be an economic experimentation vehicle, rather than a naming system, since it very much sounds like you're looking for the former, and Namecoin ain't it. Happy hacking.

[PrimeHunter2023]

Bullshit is an inverse PoW function, so I'm not going to comment on whatever the heck the above is. With one brief exception: everyone already knows my motives for being a cypherpunk developer; there's no murkiness there; it's literally stated on my personal website. I wish you luck finding a blockchain that's designed to be an economic experimentation vehicle, rather than a naming system, since it very much sounds like you're looking for the former, and Namecoin ain't it. Happy hacking.

Just to be clear, I am abrasive to everybody, and I appreciate the time you took responding. I remember chatting with you several years ago on Twitter and you were helpful and smart.

Nobody ever knows their own motives fully, and it's a good idea to examine them.

I'm not a hacker. I added the cf error blip just because it seems appropriate to mention when a network is flawed. Years ago I lived in a city with a newspaper that would hide certain kinds of comments, except from the person commenting. When people realized what the website was doing they began to joke about it until they stopped. Youtube has done the same to people, at least up to a few years ago. Once I posted a comment on the video of a political figure, and the comment was visible only on my computer. Other people have experienced the same on Youtube. Twitter is much more clever in accomplishing the same.

It's too bad there is no clean internet, no clean network connections, etc.

Namecoin is not on the path to solving that problem, but maybe it will go in that direction eventually.

This error persists so I will post it again.


Error reason: Happy Eyeballs MITM Failure
Error code: CF_HAPPY_EYEBALLS_MITM_FAILURE