Yeah, I am very excited by this so excellent detective work running
Yeah sunny, my thoughts were that if it can be done to namecoin then surely it can be done to any coin?? so this poses a potential threat to all currencies right? just as much as someone could 51% attack a chain with enough hashing power... anyone could also now bloat the blockchain with enough power / time and kill anyone with small HDD right and ruin the blockchain for that currency?
It's much easier to do with namecoin via its API of 'name_new', 'name_firstupdate' and 'name_show'. With other coins there is no such api available so it needs to create the data transaction itself, and retrieve it back and parse it via maybe getrawtransaction, and it also needs to track transaction id and possibly embed some data structure to link multiple transactions for a file, or maintain its own persistent index. It's a lot more work but in theory doable.
The only thing preventing a flood of data/spam is the transaction fee and maximum block size. Altcoins are more vulnerable to these issues because the fees are much lower compared to bitcoin right now.
namecoin fee is 0.005 per KB, or 5 coins per MB, 5000 coins per GB. Given the current exchange rate, that's about $200~$300 per GB, not much money to cause real pain for the entire network.
I am not really too worried just kidding. Still most likely ppcoin will eventually support database use like namecoin. And kudos to Running for the excellent work
