Second impression: Not a wildly outlandish idea but im not sure if it's a good idea either. Decentralized and automated registrar with a concept of renewals. Nifty.
I'm not really sure how the economics here work out.. Could I scoop up a few million names early on and then hold them forever? Has that already happened? Could this enable anonymous registration? Would these things make users trust these names more or less?
Names roll out over 52 weeks: HashName(name) % 52 = week number that a name is available. So that should attenuate squatting. Also bidding on names locks up coins for something like 2 weeks, so it's hard to bid on too many names.
So if I read this right
Creators get: 102mi coins
Sponsors get: 102mi coins
they are airdropping about 952mi coins to users on github to the tune of 4,246 per user.
So they're collecting about 20% of all coins initially dropped. That's slightly more then some. And at the value listed on https://www.namebase.io/ that adds up to some 102,000,000 * $0.44 = $44mi.
Ok, so it's not an ICO exactly, instead they raised VC funds which is expecting a return by selling coins.
I've just spent a few minutes looking through the website, docs, and a little code. And I have no idea how an end user will use these names. Everything polished about it is for trading coins not real world usage. Sounds like every other crypto coin.
It’s aimed at open source developers who will be able to figure out how to use the system, not mainstream non-tech normies. As evidenced by the large airdrop to Github.
> Handshake donates $300,000 USD to Debian [0]
You can however see it as part of the monthly SPI reports;
Additionally, anyone who can obtain HNS anonymously can thus register anonymously.