Today Namecoin celebrates its 10th anniversary! On Sunday, April 17, 2011 at 00:26:41 (GMT/UTC), the Genesis block (block 0) was generated - and the very first fork of Bitcoin and thus the world's first alternative cryptocurrency was born! Namecoin, along with Bitcoin, was and is primarily intended as an alternative Domain Name System (DNS) for websites, with the goal of becoming independent of regular ICANN domains with Top Level Domains (TLD) such as .com, .net or .org.
As a key/value store, Namecoin allows any record on the blockchain such as identities and whatever data up to a size of 255 bytes for the key (255 ASCII characters such as numbers and letters, i.e. the name of the record like a domain name) and additional 520 bytes for the value (520 ASCII characters, e.g. the DNS configuration of a domain). So in total a key/value pair can contain 775 bytes or 775 ASCII characters (see record with TxID b5a1d922cb66299ced3856b8b112201f798b81dee31a4483e935f43866bb5554 as an example).
Today, Saturday, April 17, 2021 at 00:30:02 (GMT/UTC) we mined block 554960. So including the Genesis block, we got 554,961 confirmations of block 0. During these 10 years, a total of 5,584,201 TxIDs (transactions) were written to the blockchain, including the so-called Coinbase transactions for newly mined blocks that credit the miner's wallet with the reward. Subtracting the Coinbase transactions, 5,029,240 TxIDs were issued, so 5 million transactions for transferring coins and creating and updating names. On average, these are 10 TxIDs per block including the Coinbase transactions (or 9 TxIDs per block excluding the Coinbase transactions) and 152 blocks per day over the last 10 years.
As a key/value store, Namecoin allows any record on the blockchain such as identities and whatever data up to a size of 255 bytes for the key (255 ASCII characters such as numbers and letters, i.e. the name of the record like a domain name) and additional 520 bytes for the value (520 ASCII characters, e.g. the DNS configuration of a domain). So in total a key/value pair can contain 775 bytes or 775 ASCII characters (see record with TxID b5a1d922cb66299ced3856b8b112201f798b81dee31a4483e935f43866bb5554 as an example).
Today, Saturday, April 17, 2021 at 00:30:02 (GMT/UTC) we mined block 554960. So including the Genesis block, we got 554,961 confirmations of block 0. During these 10 years, a total of 5,584,201 TxIDs (transactions) were written to the blockchain, including the so-called Coinbase transactions for newly mined blocks that credit the miner's wallet with the reward. Subtracting the Coinbase transactions, 5,029,240 TxIDs were issued, so 5 million transactions for transferring coins and creating and updating names. On average, these are 10 TxIDs per block including the Coinbase transactions (or 9 TxIDs per block excluding the Coinbase transactions) and 152 blocks per day over the last 10 years.
happy birthday !
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