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Comment by archQuestions | Hacker News Reader

If you're looking for a more open source approach to domain names, check out http://namecoin.info and http://dot-bit.org

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I was a little disappointed to learn that NameCoin domains are so cheap (0.001 NMC), and therefore rampant with squatters. I suppose there will always be an incentive to create a market and seek rents no matter what the domain system. Nonetheless, I hope NameCoin or something like it gains greater traction.

I found myself wondering the other day how long it will be before we see an attempted disruption of Google by a search crypto-currency.

That's a really intriguing idea. How do you imagine it working?

It can't, really. There's nothing remotely like web indexing in a crypto currency. Indexing websites is massively storage and bandwidth intensive, something which a distributed blockchain is not designed for. It's a nice idea to make a distributes search engine, but has nothing to do with Bitcoin.

Yeah, I wasn't implying that the specifics of BitCoin would work well for a hypothetical SearchCoin. NameCoin is feasible because the volume of data is much smaller, both for keys and values, and updated infrequently.

That's the rub, isn't it? :)

It could create a market system for search terms, similar to NameCoin; it could allow "mining" by providing rewards for validated indexing. I could see there being huge incentives for a 51% attack, though.

Alas, I'm more of a UX guy than a crypto hacker, so such things are out of my ken. But I definitely see a market for a Distributed Autonomous Corporation that provides search, and it would have a much easier on-ramp with users compared to competing with DNS.

They're currently 0.01NMC to register/update actually. Which is quite cheap, but trying to mine 0.01NMC isn't as easy as it used to be. It is the second most difficult to mine coin that exists in the world.

It would take somebody ~3 days of mining with a basic multi-GPU mining rig just to acquire the 0.01 NMC to register a domain name.

And the difficulty is jumping through the roof: http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

Thanks for the correction. NMC is still cheap in the secondary market, though; the current price puts it around a penny per domain.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still rooting for NameCoin, and I think distributed DNS is sorely needed. I just think it faces an uphill climb for adoption by users, browsers, and OS vendors.

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