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Comment by doragcoder | Hacker News Reader

I need to go more in-depth on the proposal. But the first thing that strikes me, is if you're going to use the Blockchain (with a capital "B") as storage of usernames and such. Why not use namecoin? It has the process for name consensus down. Also it won't pollute the main Bitcoin blockchain.

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Hi, author here.

I have a mild bias against altcoins, and have heard bad things about Namecoin in particular: that the anti-spam incentives aren't good, leading to illegal files stored in the blockchain itself, and that there's no compact representation (like Bitcoin's Simplified Payment Verification) for determining whether a claimed name is valid without consulting a full history.

As I understand it, these two design flaws combine to mean that you have to store some very illegal files to use a namecoin resolver, which doesn't sound good to me. (I may be mistaken, since the bad things I heard about Namecoin came from Bitcoin people..)

The notion that a file can be illegal makes as much sense to the internet as a plant being illegal makes to the earth.

Especially when it has the side effect of inhibiting what otherwise might be a compelling solution.

Your analogy doesn't hold up, as (for one) we have society and plants don't. I'm glad that child porn is illegal (which is usually distributed in files), as it makes the world safer for children.

Also: some plants are serious jerks.

If pi goes on forever, it contains any and all representations of child porn that could exist. The first person to calculate pi that far will be breaking the law. No, that doesn't make sense, nor does any sort of information being illegal. What does make sense is to legislate the actions that can generate that data, or the misappropriation of that data.

Great point !

no, it's a really contrived point.

Hear hear. This is an easy-to-understand and concise thought experiment; use it often!

You took a poor example since pi is not known to be a normal number (see eg http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NormalNumber.html )

This number however is:

    0.0 1 10 11 100 101 110 111 1000 ...

This number contains all movies that have and will ever exist. However to specify where a 700mb harry potter movie is in this number, you'll need at least 700mb to represent the index. So in some sense harry potter 'exists' in this number - but in another sense its just a silly encoding method.

Most law enforcement and judges don't ask what makes sense to the internet, even if you ignore users personal opinions about the matter.

Right, and the notion that murder is illegal makes no sense to the universe as humans are "merely" an aggregate of matter no different than any other. Nothing makes any sense to entities not capable of reasoning, that is a pointless tautology with no relevance to the discussion.

There aren't any inherent protections to storing illegal data in the Bitcoin blockchain, either (short of evading the issue by using a thin client, I suppose). The nature of what is illegal being so encompassing, in that you can ultimately encode the information into some integer of sorts either way, means it's impractical or unnecessary to provide full protection for such things.

No inherent protections, just different incentives. Storing a 4MB image at 80 bytes per $0.08 OP_RETURN transaction would cost you $4000. Why would you do that when you can use namecoin for practically free?

Which makes the statement you made that, "this currency stuff is frankly kind of uninteresting to me," kind of funny (I assume that was on purpose) because the currency stuff is exactly the thing that makes bitcoin work so well.

Fair point!

I made that statement because a lot of people don't realize that Bitcoin, ignoring the fact that you can trade it, has solved a fundamental consensus problem in distributed systems that we should care about and use :)

> I have a mild bias against altcoins, and have heard bad things about Namecoin in particular: that the anti-spam incentives aren't good, leading to illegal files stored in the blockchain itself, and that there's no compact representation (like Bitcoin's Simplified Payment Verification) for determining whether a claimed name is valid without consulting a full history.

Security-wise Namecoin is a weaker Blockchain, but I think in this case it's not that important. -- Are not the anti-spam measures hurting users as much as spammers in this case? Since you end up with higher-costs for what is otherwise practically free with a centralized service.

From the looks of it there is no reason that Bitcoin's Simplified Payment Verification wouldn't be usable with Namecoin either.

edit: Also this may be interesting to take a look at https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/vandenhooff-ver...

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