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Comment by krig | Hacker News Reader

The question is how they would do that, technically, since the system is distributed.

They could of course force you to give up your domain physically, by seizing your server. As a non-US citizen, my primary concern is relying on nameservers located in the US. My machines are located in Sweden. Of course, that's no guarantee that they would be safe from the FBI...

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I think he's referring the the "dot-bit.org" domain, not the the "*.bit" domains. The .org is still registered normally and vulnerable to SOPA.

It could be taken down, I guess a game of whack a mole would ensue with mirrors popping up.

How is this different from the existing SOPA scenario? "Rogue" sites can be taken down with mirrors popping up. It sounds like it's replacing one problem for the same problem.

The difference is, this would be whack-a-mole only for the one bit-coin.org domain, not for all the .bit domains, unlike the current whack-a-mole game which is being played with all sites using top level domains that the US government can exert authority over.

I was talking about the dot-bit.org domain, not the .bit ones. But as others have mentioned, it wouldn't accomplish much.

Yes, I misread you, sorry about that. I don't know much about namecoin or how it works in detail, but from what I can tell it is still being designed in large part. At the moment there seems to be only a single central registrar which is an obvious weakness.

It would be interesting to know if there are plans or ideas for decentralising even the registrar role, for example assigning domains through votes across multiple nodes...

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