Namecoin: distributed domain registration system based on Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Namecoin: distributed domain registration system based on Bitcoin

namecoin.bitcoin-contact.org

81 pointsllambda18 comments

This was submitted 12 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2546815)

I'm so thrilled that instead of reading almost identical bitcoin stories I can now read actually identical bitcoin stories.

At this point I'm almost hoping everyone who uses bitcoin gets picked up by the IRS for tax evasion just so no one will submit any more stories to HN.

There once was a bot which caught the reposts and commented on them.

But it was so offensive to have the reposts mentioned that the author shut it down, and perhaps even left HN. I haven't seen him around for a long time.

That was RiderOfGiraffes. He left a while ago for greener pastures. To be honest, my comment is probably one he would have objected to and I'm personally surprised at all the upvotes it has gotten. I think it reflects that there is an extremely vocal minority of people who care about Bitcoin and a lot of people don't care and just want them to take it somewhere else.

This text uses language I've seen a lot in discussion around Bitcoin:

>It allows you to ... be the only person to be able to modify it (no possible external control)

Using the cryptographic algorithms believed to be the best does not make bad things impossible, for three reasons:

1. Encryption is rarely the weakest point in security. How do the authors of Namecoin know that I won't manage my keys incompetently if I use their software?

2. We don't know what unknown flaws there are in our most trusted algorithms. The worst flaws in RSA were discovered a long time after the algorithm were made public; perhaps we will find worse flaws in AES quite soon.

3. Moore's law tells us that keys have a lifetime. The Bitcoin reaction to this and other protocol problems involves something based on network majority consent. This does not sound safe to me.

I know that anyone who uses such language as "no possible external control" is either ignorant or careless. Even careless bothers me.

Brilliant. This is an equally useful application of the block chain concept as the Bitcoin currency, and should be much less controversial.

Maybe but things like domain squatting and the inability to shut down domains pointing to illegal or controversial sites is likely to be quite controversial.

Good point. If I'd designed this, I would have considered restricting the name space to strings of digits to avoid the opprobrium when some domain-name speculator holds redcross.bit or teachforamerica.bit hostage.

I think the inability to shut down domains is the main point. (And quite a good one, in my opinion.)

It's funny how the word "coin" in that name is essentially used to refer to this distributed computational process whose purpose it is to get people to agree on some version of the state of things (i.e. what is "real").

Next thing you know, kids in 2050 refer to reality as some sort of "heavily coined world".

So does this mean that to keep a domain I have to keep running the namecoin service thereby using up CPU time that could be better spent serving requests from users?

You could outsource that just like you can currently outsource DNS.

Not really. It's bitcoin-like, so "the network" of miners would collaboratively re-enforce your control of your domains. You'd only need to use up CPU (/GPU) time to create new name coins for free - you could also purchase them from people who had mined them previously, and hadn't used them.

Running the service does not use very much CPU time. Mining is separate, and you don't even need to do that just to keep the domain up.

Despite people likely being able to break this 50 years in the future, I am willing to bet that ICE couldn't sieze a .bit domain right now.

Has anyone setup a .bit proxy yet so I can browse them without setting it up?

bitname.org

Can't resolve any of those. Not on my Internets.

If you ignore it, it will disappear.

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