It's also entertaining (at least to me and my colleagues) that PrimeHunter2023's wild speculation is exactly the opposite of the conclusions anyone who's remotely paying attention to Namecoin would draw. Case in point: "But a person does not see devs offering to work on the first altcoin after Bitcoin? Have any other developers been directly discouraged from working on Namecoin?"

Our team actually *has* been growing, and it's primarily because Namecoin devs (including but not limited to me) are recruiting new developers (and finding funding for those new developers), and those new developers decide they like our community and choose to stick around. (Robert and Rose are two recent team additions; Robert joined circa January 2023 and Rose joined circa January 2024.) None of this is a secret; we talk about this publicly all the time.

It's well known that cypherpunk communities attract mentally unwell people who are prone to all kinds of weird conspiracy theories. (I've coined "Rand's Law of Weekends" to describe how most of them vanish from the Tor IRC channels during the work week.) I'm pretty used to it by now; it doesn't actively bother me, and generally I find them entertaining. Nevertheless, "Jeremy is working with Chinese intelligence to stop the public from finding out that they have a backdoor for RSA and EC crypto, and Namecoin is actually a sheepdog project to stop endangered natural languages from being saved from extinction" certainly takes the cake for the wildest one I've seen in recent memory. v0v