Quote from: nelisky on April 17, 2013, 01:16:56 PM

Is there anyone that can provide me with a quick tl;dr of the differences between bitcoin and namecoin in terms of communication protocol between peers and wallet format?

I'm circling back on my interest in Namecoin and hitting this roadblock as well. I'm on a Mac, and failed to get the v3.50 version to compile, and the latest compiled binary I could find was too old to be accepted into the current P2P network. The wiki does somewhat document the CLI/RPC commands, but looks to be completely silent on the actual P2P/TCP protocol (effectively, what changed between this documentation of Bitcoin's Protocol, and Namecoin's implementation). If that could somehow be documented, this project could be revived in other client implementations, even if the changes can't easily be rebased onto Bitcoin's latest source.

As some of the recent comments on the wiki indicate, because this alt-coin only has a command-line daemon, and no GUI, and no web-based wallet systems, it's one of the harder alt-chains to just pick up and start using.

I've gone through and created some diffs of Namecoin's source compared to Bitcoin's source at various points, and will try and see if I can muddle through them to figure out some decent documentation on the P2P protocol. If anyone else wants to take a peek as well:

Namecoin 0.3.21 changes against Bitcoin 0.1.5: This is from Vinced's repository, and appears to be the first "released" version; the one that is timed about the same time as the announcement that started this thread, compared to the version of Bitcoin it was originally forked from. I use this one as the base since presumably by the time vinced was comfortable to release it, the various protocols and standards were fully fleshed-out. Notably, this is the largest Diff of the set, at 32.1K lines long (some coding efficiencies between 0.3.21 and 0.3.51 cleaned up 10K lines of code?).
Namecoin 0.3.51 changes against Bitcoin 0.1.5: This is the current version of Namecoin, from the main "namecoin" github repo, compared to the version of Bitcoin it was originally forked from. 22.2K lines long.
Namecoin 0.3.51 changes against Bitcoin 0.8.1: This is the current version of Namecoin, compared to the current version of Bitcoin. 25.6K lines long