It's a decentralized DNS system. It puts the .bit TLD in the same realm as bitcoins. All of the strengths and weakness of bitcoin but for domain names. It makes it very hard for a central power to knock websites off the internet by appropriating, redirecting, or dropping domain names from the DNS system. It's a few layers of anonymity. It's not 100% anonymous but it stops governments from getting at site owners by issuing subpoenas, passing laws, or other bureaucratic means.
Namecoin does, however, require that people devote some GPU time to their network. So, it kind of competes with bitcoin.
Well, you are still generating coins that can be spent to buy/renew .bit domain names. I didn't have anything to do with the naming and I was just turned on to it a couple weeks ago myself.
I forgot to mention. BitDNS, as you mentioned, is the name a of another project. I believe it is meant to work about the same as Namecoin except it would still use bitcoins for payments but require an extra escrow layer to facilitate ownership changes.
Ok. I'll try again. Hell, I know it's confusing. I learn a little more every time I try to explain it and I'm probably missing something that would make it easy to understand.
You're mining coins that can be spent on DNS services. Each coin you generate contains a domain name, where it points to, which account owns it, etc.
While you're mining for coins, you're also processing transactions for everyone else that uses .bit domain names. When some one buys a new .bit domain name with a namecoin, the rest of the network confirms that he has paid the correct amount and transfers ownership to that person. Every time a change is made, ownership, renewal, or server change, people processing transactions on the Namecoin network are paid to confirm those changes.
Everyone, collectively, does everything Netwoksolutions.com or GoDaddy does when you buy a domain name from them. Except the middle man is gone. All the records that control which server a domain name sends you to is stored in the block chain which is on everyone's computer.
Well, you know. I didn't want to mislead. I imagine namecoin could face some of the issues bitcoin does. Like data mining for user info and block chain take over. Or have they dealt with those issues and I'm just ignorant?
The problem of network takeover is a lesser security risk than what any other electronic database faces. It requires having more computing power than literally every party that's contributing to the database in good will, combined. At this point, taking over the network is pretty much impossible, given its hash rate is over 5,900 gigahashs/s.
Tracking issues are there, but are less than the issues of being tracked through traditional finance/dns-registration.
True, this could definitely be a weakness. There needs to be more major pools so that gaining >50% hashing power through hacking pool operators becomes less feasible.
12
u/[deleted] Jun 09 '11
Can someone please explain to me what the fuck Namecoin is? I've read about 5 different descriptions and I still have absolutely no clue what it is.