There are many "failing virtuous systems," a phrase I coined.
Traffic exchanges and safelists are a technology that has been around for about 25 years, and could be used as a grass
roots network larger than facebook, but very few have adopted them, although they are still actively used.
https://www.paramind.net/paramindtrafficexchanges.htmlhttps://www.paramind.net/paramindsafelists.htmlThose resources are not that current but about 80% of the sites listed are working sites.
Another virtuous system that is failing are the low cap coin staking wallets. There were about 20 good coins/decent teams
that have essentially failed in the last two years, some of these coins were 7 years old (hobotoken). They still are an easy
way to produce Bitcoin on a cheap computer for a low investment, but you need to know which coins are still alive.
https://telicalbooks.com/Staking_Book_RSPearson.htmlI'm not sure about the overall virtue of Namecoin, I just meant its inclusion in the light of the fact it was the second cryptocurrency in existence.
It's notclear to me exactly what you mean.
The traffic exchanges seem to be a sort of technical way to build a business network more than anything?
Low cap, or any cap, staking coins are producing a token that has whatever value users agree on, but has no other real utility, i.e., no intrinsic value.
Those coins, like bitcoin, are good for learning about digital currency, plus they feature something likely to be important in coming cbdc's, but nothing of value can be done with them aside from that.
Namecoin was the second recent cryptocurrency after bitcoin, so it has that sort of novelty or celebrity appeal for bitcoin types.
Also though there were dozens of digital currencies before bitcoin going back to the early 1990s.
Bitcoin is unique in that once most of the coins had been mined, i.e., after the first halving, it was slickly promoted.
The real value of namecoin is that it creates both an internet and an associated economy, that can be cloned by any group that does not want to be limited by icann or their local government.
If the internet/economy had been in that form much earlier it might have given survival chances to some groups that vanished.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_languagesIn the last hundred years Australia and the United States have led the world in exterminating ancient cultures / languages / tribes.
Europe has been carefully walked into a system that is likely to become authoritarian as it gets weaker and there will be fewer liberties at that point to develop tools for groups.
Namecoin could be adapted so that a clone can only be used by people who speak a certain language...
it could use one time cyphers instead of flawed cryptography, so you have a thumb drive with gbs of random data and you cannot get on the local version until you physically meet and provide data for communication to somebody who speaks that language and is on that network...etc.
Other possibilities too such as already discussed incorporating 'human mining' along the lines of hunter, hathor, etc, and using that mining to produce an actual digital commodity like 'science ai' instead of pissing energy into oblivion like with bitcoin.