Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: A better Namecoin
by
Steve
on 13/02/2012, 02:37:06 UTC
Quote
Bitcoin developers were actively against storing data in the blockchain.

Meh I did a quick forum search and it seems all those things have been discussed back in 2010, and developers mostly agreed it was a bad idea to use bitcoin for anything but digital cash. Satoshi though wasn't against hash-sized arbitrary data in the blockchain.

EDIT: there was even the exact same proposal of DNS on top of the bitcoin blockchain: http://privwiki.dreamhosters.com/wiki/Bitcoin_DNS_System_Proposal
This article even discusses overcoming potential resistance bitcoin developers/community Grin
I skimmed the proposal…it seems to be actually putting the name mapping data into the block chain.  You don't need to do this.  All you need to do is put a hash of a DNS transaction into the block chain.  There would be a completely separate p2p DNS software that communicates and remembers DNS transactions.  It would only interact with bitcoin by hashing those transactions down to something that looks like a bitcoin address (but actually isn't) and creates the bitcoin transaction necessary to timestamp the DNS transaction.  I believe outputs in bitcoin transactions can have a zero value (which means you don't even have to burn any bitcoins to implement it).  All of this will work without any modification to the current bitcoin protocol or software.  See CommitCoin for how it works:
http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/677.pdf