Peercoin has been around since 2012. So that's 2 years of history which shows this is nonsense. PPC peaked at 100,000,000 USD. That should be enough incentive to perform such an "attack". The answer is no. It does not even make sense.

I just read that namecoin does not and will never do name-validation [1]. interesting...

[1] https://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1719

Why would they do this? I've got a theory: to pick up some cheap BTC. Actually nice way to manipulate the markets. They have to be considered a hostile entity now. Imagine the same with floating fees.

well, I've read I don't know how many million lines of code in my life, but I've never seen something quite like it. If you're going to rely on this software for financial transactions, well... good luck? Just because somebody puts together 50kLOC does not mean anything. It could be producing random cooking recipes. the same applies to ethereum. just because someone has an idea and codes together software, doesn't mean it actually does what it is claimed. the space of all possible software is pretty large (2^X). patching together random features to make a cryptocurrency is not going to lead to the desired result.

yeah right. these lines of code is all you need to know about the project.. document strings in source code. one could not make this up.

https://github.com/Open-Transactions/Open-Transactions/blob/master/src/ots/OTServer.cpp#L1611

Reminds me of

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Marcin_Jakubowski and
http://galtsgulchchile.com

I believe if cryptocurrencies continue to grow exponentially there will be enough wealth to contribute back. Building cities themselves sounds pretty utopian, though. If a person or a group of people really wants to make things happen it takes a lot of vision to attract talent, capital, .... it's more realistic to think about a kind of resort like GaltsGulch.

The goal of ethereum is to replace the Internet (DNS, email, facebook, ...). It's not even remotely comparable to the goals of Bitcoin. I very much doubt that Bitcoin can move in this direction, for many reasons. I mean, for example the accounting system is a mess and is going to be removed. If not even something which is in the core can be fixed, how could one take one such large goals? The last 16 bips of 39 bips are in draft mode. The last feature update of Bitcoin is now 20 months ago.

Just doing ".bit" like a ".com" is by itself not interesting. The ability to change DNS by consensus is extremely powerful in different ways than that. So the incentive to build a "bit" website is very small indeed. You have to get all users to install new software, for very little benefit. Which is why NMC hasn't taken off. It's rather the potential that is fascinating. Once there are incentives to switch to alternatives, the dynamic changes.

Squatting is an issue because we are mapping names from the real world (trademark names such as "Google", "Coke", ...) to a virtual world. So the first come first serve principle is not very good. One needs more sophisticated rules than that.

many thanks for this work. I will have to look into this further. Combining namecoin with OAuth is really what I need. I think part of the issue is the work required by users to a) acquire namecoins b) running namecoind. I'm working on a) and hope to make this much easier soon. If the whole process would be seamless more people might be interested. I think currently the ID part is much more useful than the domain part.

Is there some code for an explorer, like http://explorer.namecoin.info/ somewhere? I currently don't have the time to write such a webinterface, but pulling together stuff from Bitcoin should be sufficient. It would be nice to be able to explorer the blockchain after registration, see when names were registered, etc.

As it turns out, just having a "bit" address in itself is not so interesting, from a user perspective. Yes, it's censorship resistant, but the fraction of people having to deal with censorship of their domain is very small. There has been some buzz in Silicon Valley about onename.io, and Namecoin gets mentioned quite frequently. But in terms of actual development there is not so much going on. Actually in cryptocurrencies the sum total of all new ideas is much smaller than one might assume. Most ideas don't work out for many reasons. The overall idea of BitDNS is extremely important. The actual Namecoin implementation less so, but the fact that the concept was proven to work is a milestone. I would encourage anyone to read the original BitDNS thread and think about these ideas. https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=1790.0

Sounds all pretty good. Delighted that you're choosing such a model and hope to collaborate.

On the term exchange vs broker dealer: if Alice and Bob exchange digital cash for digital cash, this is indeed an exchange settled through blockchains as soon as the money moves outside the exchange. This definition depends on the soundness of the settling algorithm - for example see the malleability issue. Bitcoin does not have a full accounting system, and the semantics are not clear. If an exchange XYZ settles trades between members that is not a true settlement via blockchain, just an internal settlement. But we can imagine a model where XYZ opens up the books, so to speak. That's what I call a distributed or transparent exchange (as opposed to P2P, which does not work IMO). But digital cash for fiat goes through central banks and therefore in that case the fiat institutions clear the trades, and impose restrictions through AML and other rules. Doing that as P2P is certainly not going to work.

Yes, you want local copies of remote state. All exchanges currently use HTTP as a transport protocol which is incredibly inefficient. If you look at some of data loads of the requests there is a lot of room for optimization. Standardizing all of this is some hard work. It would also be nice to have a public data store for historic (tick) data, as well as some standardized performance measurements. The only project which has ever done opensource Algo trading, at least that I know of, is marketcetera. They had 300kLOC at some time, although I suspect the quality of the code base is mediocre (http://code.marketcetera.org/ ). Traditionally this kind of software costed mid 6 figures. Doing proper strategy containers, performance reporting, order execution, ... is not easy to get right.

This is very cool. Thanks. Some comments:

* as far as I can see there isn't an exchange class. An important and difficult use case is handling N exchanges at the same time. For example say a trader has 1 BTC and wants to exchange for x$, where x = current last price on average over 5 exchanges. Then he wants to issue an order depending on the market rates through an abstractInterface ("routing"). basically the platform provides an abstraction for MTF's. An even more abstract pattern would be routing to exchanges with certain parameters (buy 25% at 4 exchanges each, if they are reliable).

* naming of same packages on this level [1] - what is cryptocoinpartners? what is "module", "bin"?

* I have developed my own semantics which I will publish in 1-2 months. Interoperability will become more important over time. There is certainly a lot to be done in this area, and I'm glad there are these opensource projects. There were are a couple of closed source ones, which misses the point.

* License?

[1]
https://github.com/timolson/cointrader/tree/master/src/main/java/org/cryptocoinpartners

I might get around building something like onename.io as opensource, because I need a blockchain based auth system for people to use. Systems like these could really push namecoin's use. Onename.io claiming that they are "decentral" while doing this as closed source is kinda pointless. But the webinterface I think shows how the future might look like. Building the Twitter/Github/.. API's takes time though. But in these case reliance on a Trusted third party is okay. For ".bit" it's not, because the request takes place continuously.

To get around the squatting, one will need a good auction system, which is hard to do. Actually for the Internet this is broken, too. Transfering from one registrar to another is often impossible, and all these registrars do is take a lot of money for administering a database entry (+censorship for free!). There is a protocol (RFC3731) which in theory handles domain transfers, but nobody implements it. Actually even the guys who've written the protocol don't implement it. If anyone is interested in all of this please let me know.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3731

CA's are not independent actors. There is 1 (one) root for the Internet's DNS. What any user thinks about how the DNS performs is completely irrelevant. The DNS is controlled by ICANN and various corporations with some interference of governments. If I don't like how the system works there is nothing I can do. There is no feedback from users, other than through corrupted channels. In Namecoin users can suggest changes. It solves the problem of key storage, but unfortunately not the problem of key <> identity assignment. The original BitDNS discussion contained some interesting material on the subject.


Well, there is a tension between those who want to have a Bitcoin system which operates above the law (darkmarkets) and those who want to integrate it with law (US law, I presume). I don't have an opinion, but one should recognize what this is about. One can start with the simple question what actually happens if two people transact on a public network with untraceable cash. What language does one use to describe the process ("merchant", "customer"), what is the role of intermediaries of all sorts (courts, law enforcement, transportation systems, etc.). I believe it's impossible to make any sense of this by focusing on "technical" issues alone. People on the Bitcoin dev list actually believe that economics is off-topic. Well, that leads to pretty strange and unproductive discussions.

It will work for the same jurisdiction, but not cross-jurisdiction. It could even be such that a merchant has to automatically acknowledge if a payment was received via the public blockchain. One example implementation would be forcing the merchant to use a certain address which is attached to the name (the merchant wouldn't be able to generate arbitrary addresses). In effect that's what the DAC/smart contract ideas are about. Registering a corporation is equivalent to assinging a payment address to a legal entity. A limited liability company is in a sense nothing else than a restricted account. Some of this can be implemented today, but I very much doubt that Bitcoin is going to be the system doing this (i.e. anything interesting in the future).

Which court? If the merchant is in Chile and the customer in Russia, what use is this? Bitcoin is a global system, but there is no world court people can go to, to settle disputes. This can in theory only apply if the two parties agree which court settles disputes, and the court even considers itself responsible. If you're drafting social protocols you should have some understanding of how economic transactions work. Commercial transactions consist of much more than just the payment itself (what happens if there is no delivery, delivery not on time, bad deliveries, ...). And if you want to integrate with legal systems via software, you better clearly specify what you're talking about. Since when is the Bitcoin network dependent on courts?! And if the payment protocol addresses any of these issues, why is it not stated in the draft protocol. That's what these kinds of documents are there for. You would find that it would be much like writing law, because you would have to first define merchants, customers, payments. And then Bitcoin is not about "payments" between merchants and customers. It's about transactions between peers. So the nature of the system and the debate already has shifted dramatically.

CA's are "funded by their users"? How so? If you want to find out more about how CA's work I recommend this page: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/certificate-authority-2012-02-25-en . Starting a discussion on that basis is difficult.

Tor is more "centralized" than CA's? The claim that Tor is "funded" by the US government is pretty far out there - I would like to see more detailed evidence for such claims. Here is a list of sponsors: https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors.html.en

The TOR protocol was basically invented by David Chaum in 1981, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_network. It's the same guy who laid for the foundation for Bitcoin in the 80's. Clearly the idea of a mixing network is the exact opposite of attaching identities to nodes. In the link I posted above he argued recently that all routers could/should be TOR nodes. The whole point of mixing is to detach identity from actors. The whole point of CA's is the opposite.

Well, there is a partly alternative working system- Namecoin, although it can't deal with key distribution. If you're referring to X.509 you're actually referring to DNS. The DNS is controlled by the Internet corporation which defines who can issues certificates and domain names. So perhaps we can start with the acknowledgement of how the Internet actually works. X509 is an encoding standard. The Internet's root is controlled by a vast system of corporations and governments, and some opensource contributions (and very occasionally an Internet activist, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum#cite_note-Cha81-20). How much do you users of the Internet (and Bitcoin) have to say about its inner workings? Is Bitcoin democratic/decentralized/anarchistic/...? And if so how does that relate to the development process? There is a mythology that Bitcoin follows the opensource model. Well, for example Linux ultimately depends on the discussion of one person (BDFL).

I think you're using the wrong terminology. What is a "payment" and what is a "merchant"? These concepts don't exist in Bitcoin. Bitcoin knows about keys, nodes and transactions. So you're imposing your own world view (literally) onto the system, without even the suggestion of an argument. The first thing would be to realize that Bitcoin is not just about cryptography and software, but economics, law, politics, etc. But you're basically stating apriori you don't want to deal with any of these complex problems. For example the whole notion of privacy is completely interlinked with law. Law of nation states operate on the principle that you can identify people (and indeed staying completely private is illegal in any country).