Quote from: nutildah on August 29, 2024, 01:17:33 AM

Regardless, it was never meant to compete with Bitcoin. It was meant to extend the functionality of the blockchain. The intentions for what Namecoin was meant to be are spelled out in the OP:

Quote from: vinced on April 18, 2011, 12:52:59 AM

It is inspired by the bitdns discussion and recent failures of the DNS.

I think we're in agreement, but FWIW it's useful to be careful about falling into the "Vincent's Vision" trap. (This, incidentally, is a nice advantage that Namecoin's community has over Bitcoin's -- "Vincent's Vision" is generally only used as the punchline of jokes, whereas the cult of personality surrounding Satoshi is not healthy, to put it mildly.) There have been a variety of efforts over the years to introduce new use cases for Namecoin that aren't directly related to DNS censorship. Most of these efforts can be traced in genesis to an anonymous IRC user circa 2012 who suggested using Namecoin as a PKI (e.g. for TLS). These efforts quickly gained the support of the Namecoin community without Vince's help, and by now they're a core part of what Namecoin does. (I joined Namecoin dev in 2013 specifically because I was interested in the TLS PKI use case.) There have also been various less-well-received proposed use cases ("Let's make an on-chain version of Bitmessage! Surely that won't have technical problems!"), but those were rejected by the community because we all determined that they were a bad idea, not because we thought Vince would disapprove. Generally speaking, the Namecoin community likes new ideas that are technically sound, and we don't evaluate technical soundness in terms of anything Vince wrote.

I think an argument could *maybe* be made that Vince's initial non-inclusion of AuxPoW (Namecoin didn't become a Bitcoin sidechain until chain-hopping by miners crippled the Namecoin blockchain) meant that he intended it to compete with Bitcoin (at least in some sense, e.g. competing for hashrate). Vince isn't around to comment on that now, but in any event I don't think anyone really cares: Namecoin is a sidechain now, and we're not going to undo that, just like we're not going to compete with Bitcoin in any other way. You could maybe make an argument that we should get rid of the NMC token and allow name registration with BTC using a pegged sidechain, and that our failure to do so means we're competing with Bitcoin. While I am sympathetic to this argument in principle, the reality on the ground is that no one knows how to make decentralized pegged sidechains work properly, and I don't have any interest in speculating on a research area that hasn't presented a concrete proposal that I can audit for safety.