Probably a little bit of a dumb question, .. But I was wondering why the domain names have to expire 12,000 blocks?
One of the biggest areas of future development and use case scenarios, seems to be that of the open transaction style issuance of stock, bond or for that matter any form of digital unique certificate and tracking of their ownership. At first glance this seems ideally suited to Namecoin, but obviously this breaks down if the certificate expires after a ~ 1year rather than being transferred indefinitely.