Topic: [announce] Namecoin - a distributed naming system based on Bitcoin - page 3. (Read 596107 times)

Just to be clear, I am abrasive to everybody, and I appreciate the time you took responding. I remember chatting with you several years ago on Twitter and you were helpful and smart.

Nobody ever knows their own motives fully, and it's a good idea to examine them.

I'm not a hacker. I added the cf error blip just because it seems appropriate to mention when a network is flawed. Years ago I lived in a city with a newspaper that would hide certain kinds of comments, except from the person commenting. When people realized what the website was doing they began to joke about it until they stopped. Youtube has done the same to people, at least up to a few years ago. Once I posted a comment on the video of a political figure, and the comment was visible only on my computer. Other people have experienced the same on Youtube. Twitter is much more clever in accomplishing the same.

It's too bad there is no clean internet, no clean network connections, etc.

Namecoin is not on the path to solving that problem, but maybe it will go in that direction eventually.

This error persists so I will post it again.


Error reason: Happy Eyeballs MITM Failure
Error code: CF_HAPPY_EYEBALLS_MITM_FAILURE

Bullshit is an inverse PoW function, so I'm not going to comment on whatever the heck the above is. With one brief exception: everyone already knows my motives for being a cypherpunk developer; there's no murkiness there; it's literally stated on my personal website. I wish you luck finding a blockchain that's designed to be an economic experimentation vehicle, rather than a naming system, since it very much sounds like you're looking for the former, and Namecoin ain't it. Happy hacking.

Why don't you tell me specifically which political issue/rant does not pertain to nmc, in your view, and I'll explain why it does, in my view.

Naming is one aspect of nmc. It would be more accurate to say it is a tool that creates an economy and a naming system together.

ol·i·gar·chy
/ˈäləˌɡärkē/
noun
a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution.


ar·is·toc·ra·cy
/ˌerəˈstäkrəsē/
noun
the highest class in certain societies, especially those holding hereditary titles or offices.
"the ancient Polish aristocracy had hereditary right to elect the king"

No different than most crypto, namecoin has a core group, including developers who volunteer their work. But as with most crypto that generousity is based on newcomers paying homage to the established group.



Yes, Right now it is 41%.

https://chainz.cryptoid.info/nmc/#!extraction




How can you say "Namecoin is, generally speaking, not...."

So you volunteer as a namecoin dev and that gives you a uniform and decorations?

You have a firm construct in your mind of what suits you, what namecoin should be, and 'volunteering' lets you take your power out and exercise it.

You are generous to volunteer, but your motives are murky, same as me and anybody else. I'll be careful not to poach deer in your kingdom.




Uhm, what???

Here is the quote you are abusing.


Obviously nmc includes a naming system.

Is catering only to bigger miners also inherent to it? Should a decentralized economy be built on feeding crypto whales? Most people either leave crypto, because of this cavalier attitude towards obliging poorer people to feed richer people, or they submit. I don't know how to address that, what to say. It's the norm in crypto.

~

ETA

Sorry if it sounds rude, but when a person's strength is their weakness it should be pointed out.

The core foundation of crypto today is the notion that developers are the kings and the peons must respect that.

What if you went to a mechanic and he said he would not fix your car unless you paint the car his favorite color? Should mechanics do that, just because they can get away with it?


Error reason: Happy Eyeballs MITM Failure
Error code: CF_HAPPY_EYEBALLS_MITM_FAILURE

OK so I read through the above posts 3 times and I still can't tell what concrete thing you are proposing. I see various rants about politics (not the kind of politics that Namecoin pertains to), but nothing about naming (which is what we do). I also can't tell who you are claiming constitutes an "oligarchy"/"aristocracy" in Namecoin (...the miners? ...the devs? ...random users on Reddit and Matrix?).

Regarding your claim that (I guess?) a single pool has 70% of hashrate, that's not what Metrics says. As of Aug 1, the largest pool is Antpool with less than 42% hashrate. https://metrics.namecoin.org/namecoin/period-timestamps-14-days/pool/charts/latest.txt

Namecoin is, generally speaking, not a vehicle for testing experimental blockchain features. To the extent that we do scientific research, it's mostly in layer 2, and occasionally on-chain only for things that are critically required for the naming system to work.

If you think it's "cavalier" that the Namecoin community wants to be a naming system as opposed to an economics experiment, I'm not really sure what to say. *shrug*

Another thing missing from recent discussion is the first step in getting non namecoin people to benefit from .bit sites.

You say to a person "There is an alternate internet you can use in parallel with icann".

And they say "What's on it?"

And you say "Well, right now 30 websites by fringe types ranting. For any typical internet thing, news, apps, music, commercial sites, etc you have to use icann".

There has never been a tangible product or service that would attract new people, aside from abstract notions about decentralization.

If namecoin had an infrastructure like dnt / District0x / https://district0x.io/ any group could drop not just a web and economy, but a range of things into their system.

Also something like that would attract more developers.

District0x is an abstraction with no central location, with a toxic focus on 'governance', and it's floundering, but if the general idea were added to namecoin it would improve.

The bottom line though is that most people join an economy for the money.

Namecoin generates money....which it feeds to whales.

There must be a solution? A way to use a large coins / e.g. btc / hashrate to secure things without letting that utility become a way for well off people to feed only themselves.

Huntercoin had a similar problem. A brilliant idea but it benefited only a few, and those few could not relinquish their monopoly on the benefit. Or maybe the technical challenges were hard in that case.

I do not have the resources to do much, a negative net worth, no dev skills, and I am not even in the top 500 nmc holders, but there should be people, whales, who will risk a little of what they have to break namecoin's inertia.

It sort of has the tone of an exclusive low budget club with an aristocracy who want to preserve the status quo.

Edit  to add /

Just for the heck of it, a simple roadmap that could easily lead to namecoin being the #1crypto

All of the top cryptos today are top mainly because of scamminess. I'm not aware of any $1b+ market cap coin that is mostly legitimate.

Namecoin is one of the only coins that could grow quickly without adding more scamminess.

Bitcoin is mostly hype and scam, but at a few points in its history it had substantive uses that grew it. Maybe ten years ago there were taskwork sites that paid people in bitcoin to do simple tasks. I spent hours a day on that and it gave me cash. A lot of other people the same. That was one of bitcoin's few legitimate currency moments.

Step 1) Implement clone/fork feature.

Step 2) Pay a namecoin person to create namecoin forks for various social groups. In other words groups that would actually want and benefit from a closed internet and economy. This step might cost a few thousand dollars to start until the endpoint was reached i.e., free publicity through word of mouth and free news.

Step 3) Partner with Xaya/Chi to create taskwork coins based on developing narrow sciences with the work limited to those in a specific economy.

There is an important German concept of worldview or weltanschauung. Groups of similar people, on their own, develop sciences that are completely mysterious to other groups. When the group no longer has isolation/space to develop then their sciences consolidate and decay. They become "useful" to a larger group e.g. 'melting pot', but any further development is trivial.

AI is considered the modern ".com" because it has become such a profitable investment.

But the truth is that what is sold to the public as "AI" is globalist horseshit. Several experts in AI have tried to steer things in the proper direction, including at least one Eastern European cryptocurrency, but have failed.

Is it important to derail the current AI fraud and legitimize real AI as a science tool? It would need a lengthy discussion, but it is important, and the stakes are high.

Step 4) As long as there is a small but significant collective of groups using taskwork AI i.e., nmc + a huc style "human mining" then the corporate AI stupidity will dissolve on its own. There is no comparison of relative strength between the two systems.

Aside from that, if a person does not like steps 3 and 4, a person should look at what is happening to Europe.

The notion of federating groups has been widely studied.

The fake federation "European Community" was not arranged by an expert to succeed. It was carefully designed to fail, to descend into an authoritarian centralized blob.

There are not many viable escape paths for Europe, but namecoin style internets/economies would give people breathing room when things begin to decay.

There are certainly corporate or "globalist" actors who do not want free groups outside the control of the blob.

There is no single corporation or group or affinity that is causing this misguidance. "Colonizers" are often blamed, as are specific groups like Jews.

A good anti globalist film is Europa the Last Battle. 50 years ago, as a boy in Hebrew school, I would have called every point in the film anti semitic trash. Today I'm one of many Jews promoting the film.

Namecoin has powerful enemies, and it isn't a magic bullet, but it could be an important coin.

~

One important point about that movie is that it unfortunately picks on Jews, because we typically are no good at defending our interests sensibly. The exact same globalist point could be made in a film about British globalists, French globalists, etc. Problem is that globalist  gangsters in those groups are not as clumsy.

An honest version of Europa TLB would apportion responsibility more sensibly, accurately.

70% of the last 1000 mined blocks went to this address
https://chainz.cryptoid.info/nmc/address.dws?nc1q2ml905jv7gx0d8z5f7kl23af0vtrjk4j0llmwr.htm
which has 102k nmc.
That address doesn't look like a normal pool, their last outgoing transaction was 150k, and before that 100k.

Again, not as bad as bitcoin overall, but I don't even know how to address the cavalier attitude toward that kind of thing.

Another point you touch on "security of naming system" // Security in a currency, and its derivatives in this case, comes mostly from support from users.

For example the usd is threatened, more than anything, by Washington's heavy handedness. Reckless spending could be solved but not when the dollar is being used as a blunt object against weak countries. At this point any ethical u.s. citizen supports the end of the dollar.

Namecoin devs have to decide if they want to collapse as an oligarchy, or if they want to create a genuinely useful product, even at the expense of some of their glory....For example, one of many, as mentioned before, a simple clone/fork feature that lets any group breakaway at will.




If you want to have a cryptography discussion, I'm ready.

But it's not about 'state actors'. There are several countries that can empty any crypto wallet.

It's about the random people who see a coin they like and want to mine it but are not interested in selling their wife to slave traders so they can afford mining gear.

Some small guy likes namecoin? The message is "Come back when you have money".

Would you like to have a discussion on this thread about cryptography as it relates to cryptocurrency?

Well yeah, we care more about security for the naming system than we do about making it easy for a small miner to solo-mine blocks. We *are* interested in improving the ability to pool-mine Namecoin (since that does affect security of the naming system), and we've worked with Luke Dashjr and Matt Corallo on draft specs for this, but for now it's an active research area and would require a hardfork (a contentious one, no less, unless some technical objections are solved).


I just checked the Huntercoin specs and it accepts two parent PoW types: Bitcoin style and Litecoin style. Litecoin's PoW is a joke that no cryptographer would ever want to go near. Maybe that's OK for Huntercoin's threat model (no state actor is going to try to take over the Huntercoin blockchain) but it's not going to fly here. I also question whether Litecoin's hashrate is nearly high enough for it to provide meaningful AuxPoW security to its sidechains to begin with (even if we accepted the dubious proposition that stuffing a memory-hard key derivation function into Hashcash can be called a "PoW"), but I haven't looked.

A long time ago I tried to mine coins, but never succeeded except simple staking coins. Any time you start a question to me with "You do know..." and end it with "right?"... the answer is likely no.

My point was that if people use their hashing power to mine both btc and nmc then you probably have some heavyweights using computing power that an individual cannot compete with realistically.

Some coins use to split algorithms e.g. huc, xmy, dgb etc to force some fairness in mining and add security, but maybe the heavyweight miners i.e., btc merge miners adds something too, maybe security.

From nmc's website


So, yes you are right.

My main interest in namecoin, aside from making money, is simply that it has an extremely important real use case.

There are many hidden globalizing influences in the economy, and small networks of internets with attached economies is one push in a better direction.

Most cultures and languages will be on this list eventually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_extinction

And you have to be careful of what your opinions are, unless you are connected to power.

https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2010/11/full-list-of-the-80-domains-seized-today-by-us.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/23/us-seizes-three-dozen-websites-used-for-iranian-disinformation

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/us-seized-18-web-domains-used-for-recruiting-money-mules/

It's very similar to the rationale for promoting flawed cryptography.

"we can solve crimes, we can help people by controlling them..." etc

When one person in town has a gun he or she promotes their image as benevolent, as they get richer and richer.

You do know that Namecoin's sidechain design doesn't care if the parent block is actually a real thing, right? Like, you can just make up a totally fictitious parent block and use that to mine if you don't want to use a real parent chain.


PoS is already covered in our FAQ.

Thanks. As an aside, it seems like there should be a way for individuals to mine nmc using their own computer without merge mining.

There is speculation that this crop of recent digital currencies, btc etc,  were begun to prep people for CBDCs which will allow governments to issue unlimited currency by moderating monetary velocity. If you double the money supply and halve monetary velocity then no inflation. One way monetary velocity is controlled in digital currencies is to lock coins up for staking.

So if nmc added a staking mechanism it would both incentivize individual mining and prep people for the final descent into Orwellian hell.




Mikhail Sindeyev, Aaron Swartz, Dan Kaminsky...

Nuff said.

Good choice!

If you take a look at this Metrics report, you'll see all eight 24-hour periods in which Namecoin hashrate exceeded Bitcoin. https://metrics.namecoin.org/namecoin/period-timestamps-1-days/pool/charts/gt_parent.txt

The only consecutive 2-day period on that report is 12-13 November 2017. That was when BCH got into a hashwar with Bitcoin, with the purported goal of BCH being to prove that with more hashrate, it was the "real Bitcoin". Since Namecoin can use both Bitcoin and BCH as a parent chain, Namecoin wound up with a higher hashrate than either Bitcoin or BCH during those two days. When I tweeted about it, Samson Mow from Blockstream noticed my tweet and commented "Oh crap, now Namecoin is the real Bitcoin." So yeah that's what the shirt design is referencing -- a cool historical event in which Namecoin's ability to use multiple parent chains got demonstrated in practice.

The high price for the jackets is just because TeeSpring charges us a lot for those. That design is available on other products if you want something mildly cheaper. E.g. https://namecoin.creator-spring.com/listing/real-light-1482?product=389


The Namecoin.org Team page credits Satoshi in the "Pre-Genesis Researchers" section, along with other people like Dan Kaminsky (who definitely would not be considered a Namecoin developer). That section is for people who did interesting research that laid the groundwork for Namecoin, but never worked on Namecoin itself. https://www.namecoin.org/team/

"Namecoin"
"The REAL Bitcoin*"
"For 48 hours 12-13 November 2017"

https://namecoin.creator-spring.com/listing/real-light-j-8882?product=2174&variation=106070

Not going to pay $67 for a jacket, but curious.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Somebody put up a big buy wall on btc/nmc. I don't have the financial muscle to push it up but somebody should.

Bitcoin began with a few people who had hundreds of thousands of bitcoin each, including SN, who carefully pumped it to the sky.*

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+bitcoin+did+people+on+the+original+Bitcoin+pump+crew+have

And who can forget how the U.S. government shut down Bitcoin's two biggest competitors, at strategic times, to give it an edge?

"e-gold was the first widely used Internet money, introduced in 1996, and grew to several million users before the US Government shut it down in 2008."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_currency

2008, imagine that.

Around a million people from Liberty Reserve alone were shuffled to Bitcoin for the second pump in 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve

Namecoin was not instamined the same way, many more people mined it from the start, so it would be much harder to pump, but it also is a useful coin with an important real world function which Bitcoin is not.

The only complaint I have about Namecoin, aside from flawed cryptography, is that it does not yet have an easy way for any people anywhere to make use of its real world functionality.


Digital currencies pre bitcoin were entirely about financial functionality or games.

Bitcoin popped up with the premise that "We developers are smart. Everybody should pay tribute to us. We will feed you a fake 'liberty' narrative if you throw money to us."

Namecoin, as long as it isn't monopolized, could deliver on some of the lies of Bitcoin.


*Not to pick on Bitcoin since Ethereum was much sleazier, paying off Coinmarketcap to remove the premine asterisk so it wouldn't get filtered out as a scamcoin.*


*Not to pick on Ethereum since Monero was much sleazier, hiring hundreds of spammers and trolls to pump the coin then buying out a website that provided evidence that it was a government project.*

*Not to pick on Monero...never mind.

Four Namecoin developers (including me) attended the Tor 2024 Lisbon meeting, GPN 22, and MoneroKon 4. Summary (including videos from GPN and MoneroKon) is here: https://www.namecoin.org/2024/07/24/tor-2024-gpn-22-monerokon-4-summary.html

On a less serious note, people sometimes ask me where they can get the Namecoin t-shirts that a few of us wear to conferences. They can be found on the Namecoin TeeSpring shop: https://namecoin.creator-spring.com/ . 8 designs are available ("Chains", "Connections", "Daughter", "MMO", "Real", "Revolutionary", "Shadow", and "Sidechain"), in various fits of short-sleeve, long-sleeve, hoodies, sweatshirts, and jackets, for men, women and kids. Profits support Namecoin dev, and it can be a fun way to spread the word. (If you don't understand the in-jokes in some of the designs, feel free to ask in this thread, I don't mind elaborating on them.)

Namecoin price down a fair bit eh?  I took a bit of a slide on that, it seems.

the status is that no one here has bothered to apply for listing in any exchange since ancient times.
Just getting into (any exchange) would be huge, but seems that nowadays any exchange is demanding that the "official" developers apply, (and pay) something they are not doing it.

the status is that this is coin has been the grandmother of the pump and dump and it have leave more people reeling with loses than we can count. most "investors" have been burned because of the "no marketing" policy.

the status is that the actual users of the coin don't care about the price because hey, cheap domains, but this people were mostly Assange and some domainsquatter guy. (so we got 2 users and one is in jail...)

the status is that this could be one of the greatest coins but have fallen behind because it's just following bitcoin, only some hackers (the owner of btc-e and wex) have (had) big stash of the coin and doesn't seem innovative, because they didn't bother to fund any development.

 but time will tell. and one of this days i'm gonna drop a couple btcs and we will 10x but first we gotta get into the big exchanges or at least the no KYC ones like bitget.

because without being able to use a coin to move funds between exchanges there is really no use case for it. even doge can be used for that.!

Anybody can decide for themselves on those various questions.

https://medium.com/@namecoinerc/namecoin-is-back-nmc-c294bd0a530e

~

On a separate issue, suppose I belong to a group which wants to make its own private internet / intranet and economy.

Is there an easy way for us to do that, or do we need to hire a coder to create a clone or fork of Namecoin?

Can it be done for free by people who are not interested in programming?

He did not "contribute" to Namecoin in any way. Stop trying to rewrite history.


That is not Namecoin, it's BitDNS, which wasn't even his idea. He just chimed in a few suggestions on how a BitDNS would work -- this was before the creation of Namecoin, which again, he had nothing to do with.


The market disagrees with this take by a near infinite ratio.


He didn't even "contribute" to BitDNS, because BitDNS never existed. It was just an idea.

A lot of electrum wallets get stopped by computer firewalls, may work on one computer, not another.




Satoshi directly contributed to two digital currencies, Bitcoin and Namecoin.

Anybody can read the BitDNS threads and decide.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitdns-in-the-words-of-satoshi-6197

In fact of Satoshi's last 12 comments, 7 involved BitDNS

https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/satoshi-3

Bitcoin was an example of how a 'pseudo commodity', could be created in a fair way if a person trusts the underlying cryptography.

But aside from that, bitcoin does absolutely nothing.

Namecoin has vastly important uses, and that is probably why Satoshi contributed to BitDNS.

Ethereum Name Service is a very weak imitation of Namecoin. It cannot be cloned for use by local groups who want to create their own economies etc which will be the main future use of Namecoin.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/01/03/ens-token-jumps-50-as-vitalik-buterin-hails-it-as-super-important/

Very very soon Europe will be in chaos.

The United States has been preparing by hardening and militarizing its police.

Namecoin would potentially smooth a lot of bumps, coins dependent on another chain would not.

Does anyone here use electrum wallet and is it working ok for you regarding getting a connection?