I filled in for Robert doing a talk at MoneroKon 5. Videos are expected soon-ish. https://www.namecoin.org/2025/06/15/monerokon-5.html

I also gave a talk (and published a paper) at GCER 2025, which is unlikely to be fascinating material for most people here, but for those of you who find STEM education interesting, GCER is expected to publish videos soon-ish as well. https://www.kipr.org/gcer

Meanwhile on the dev front, SocksTrace has been steadily gaining more functionality. https://www.namecoin.org/2025/07/25/sockstrace-improvements.html


I haven't tried to use BasicSwap yet (I have no need since I don't routinely trade between cryptocurrencies), but my experience working with their devs on getting Namecoin added was generally pleasant.

A good recent real-world example of why you probably wouldn't want to use Namecoin for timestamping, with OpenTimestamps being a more scalable alternative:

https://projecttimestamper.org/

This kind of large-scale operation would be prohibitively expensive with Namecoin, whereas OpenTimestamps makes it so cheap that Peter can fund the transactions with donations. The developers do give a shout-out to Namecoin for PKI purposes, which is cool. Use the right tool for the job!


BasicSwap is way cooler than Binance. And... they just added Namecoin! (Yes, we do engage in outreach to exchanges; this is a good result of those efforts.)

https://basicswapdex.com/

You haven't made any "enquiries [sic]". This is your third straight post in which you purported to have a question but declined to actually state what the question was.

Bullshit is an inverse-PoW function, and most freedom software devs don't consider inverse-PoW to be "polite". To avoid falling victim to further inverse-PoW, I do not have any plans to answer your "enquiry [sic]", in the unlikely event that you ever actually decide to make one.

Happy hacking.

> Tries to use a privacy-focused project
> Is angry that the project doesn't use Discord for tech support

Not sure if I should be laughing or facepalming.

Some more details have been published about the anonymity research project that Power Up Privacy is funding, which has been named Occlumask: https://www.namecoin.org/2025/05/11/occlumask-introduction.html

Meanwhile some major code quality improvements have happened in ncp11: https://www.namecoin.org/2025/05/13/code-quality-improvements-in-ncp11.html


You're likely to get faster answers on the Namecoin Matrix channel, but if you prefer to ask your question here for whatever reason, feel free.

Summary of Namecoin at 38C3: https://www.namecoin.org/2025/03/30/38c3-summary.html

(It took longer than desired to get the 38C3 content posted, but such is life. Hopefully the official recordings will be up soon, but in the meantime, a decent amount of content is in the live stream archives.)

Meanwhile, SocksTrace is transitioning from ptrace to seccomp userspace notifications. Explanation by Robert: https://www.namecoin.org/2025/03/30/sockstrace-seccomp-notify.html

And last but certainly not least, three new grants for TLS and anonymity research. https://www.namecoin.org/2025/03/30/namecoin-tls-anonymity-research-funding-power-up-privacy-nlnet-ngi0-core.html

Two of the grants come from a new funder, Power Up Privacy, so please welcome PUP to Namecoin's increasingly diverse sponsor list. We're also excited that one of the grants is for a new developer (Alice); please give her a warm welcome. We're also quite pleased that funded collaboration with Tor Project is continuing.

This is, uh, not a thing? Plenty of changes to the website have been proposed and/or coordinated outside of GitHub. :/


...you do realize that you're free to make unsolicited suggestions, right? Lots of people do exactly that. Sometimes those unsolicited suggestions get adopted.

In late 2022 - early 2023, we took on an intern (Robert) under Tor Project's umbrella to work on SocksTrace, a proxy leak mitigation tool with wide-ranging applicability across the privacy space. We're super excited to report that NLnet's NGI0 Core Fund has just awarded funding for Robert and me to continue development of SocksTrace. Contributing to the broader ecosystem is a core part of Namecoin's activities (we don't just maintain a blockchain).

https://www.namecoin.org/2024/10/21/sockstrace-funding-nlnet-ngi0-core.html

...well that sure was weird. I don't think anyone was expecting the first mention of Namecoin on HBO to be in the context of another ridiculous failed media attempt to dox Satoshi.

On a more substantive note, some people were probably curious what awesome things Rose and I got up to at the Tor Lisbon meeting (since there were no live streams). Happily, Tor Project has uploaded session notes (and my slides). I've added links here: https://www.namecoin.org/2024/07/24/tor-2024-gpn-22-monerokon-4-summary.html

Also, the NGI Assure program (operated in part by NLnet) has successfully concluded. NLnet has produced a very nice review of all the epic stuff that was funded by the program. We're right next to Qubes OS in the banner, what a cool neighbor! https://nlnet.nl/news/2024/20240919-NGI-Assure-Concluded.html

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.

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

FWIW there's an alternate formulation (which I like less) of this general concept called Brandolini's Law. According to Wikipedia it was coined in 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law


I mean, if you actually provided a specific claim rather than... whatever the hell the above is, I might be inclined to engage. But since you didn't, no, I'm not going to engage with inverse PoW.

That said, the people in a cypherpunk channel I hang out in did appreciate the comic relief about EC math, so thanks for that.

Wow, lots of spam in this thread this week. Skipping over the inverse PoW....


The analogy is actually a bit more complex than that: while PoW is asymmetric in the sense that it's highly expensive to produce a PoW but trivially easy to verify it, bullshit is asymmetric in the opposite direction: not only is it trivially easy to produce bullshit, but it's *also* highly expensive to debunk it.

Alas, I regret to inform you that I didn't come up with the analogy, I just picked it up from my social graph long ago. I don't know who first came up with it, but a quick Twitter search shows that JJ from Handshake (whom I've worked with in the past) said in 2020 that someone had previously told him the analogy, but he didn't seem to remember who told him either. I think I first heard it before 2020 (but it's hard to be sure), and I don't think either JJ or I am the other's source (again, hard to be sure). Anyway, it seems to be popular lore among cypherpunks by now. If you ever find out who first said it, please let me know, but in any event, crediting me is unnecessary: I'm just a relay.

Bullshit is an inverse PoW function, so I'm not going to comment on whatever the heck the above is. With one brief exception: everyone already knows my motives for being a cypherpunk developer; there's no murkiness there; it's literally stated on my personal website. I wish you luck finding a blockchain that's designed to be an economic experimentation vehicle, rather than a naming system, since it very much sounds like you're looking for the former, and Namecoin ain't it. Happy hacking.

OK so I read through the above posts 3 times and I still can't tell what concrete thing you are proposing. I see various rants about politics (not the kind of politics that Namecoin pertains to), but nothing about naming (which is what we do). I also can't tell who you are claiming constitutes an "oligarchy"/"aristocracy" in Namecoin (...the miners? ...the devs? ...random users on Reddit and Matrix?).

Regarding your claim that (I guess?) a single pool has 70% of hashrate, that's not what Metrics says. As of Aug 1, the largest pool is Antpool with less than 42% hashrate. https://metrics.namecoin.org/namecoin/period-timestamps-14-days/pool/charts/latest.txt

Namecoin is, generally speaking, not a vehicle for testing experimental blockchain features. To the extent that we do scientific research, it's mostly in layer 2, and occasionally on-chain only for things that are critically required for the naming system to work.

If you think it's "cavalier" that the Namecoin community wants to be a naming system as opposed to an economics experiment, I'm not really sure what to say. *shrug*

Well yeah, we care more about security for the naming system than we do about making it easy for a small miner to solo-mine blocks. We *are* interested in improving the ability to pool-mine Namecoin (since that does affect security of the naming system), and we've worked with Luke Dashjr and Matt Corallo on draft specs for this, but for now it's an active research area and would require a hardfork (a contentious one, no less, unless some technical objections are solved).


I just checked the Huntercoin specs and it accepts two parent PoW types: Bitcoin style and Litecoin style. Litecoin's PoW is a joke that no cryptographer would ever want to go near. Maybe that's OK for Huntercoin's threat model (no state actor is going to try to take over the Huntercoin blockchain) but it's not going to fly here. I also question whether Litecoin's hashrate is nearly high enough for it to provide meaningful AuxPoW security to its sidechains to begin with (even if we accepted the dubious proposition that stuffing a memory-hard key derivation function into Hashcash can be called a "PoW"), but I haven't looked.

You do know that Namecoin's sidechain design doesn't care if the parent block is actually a real thing, right? Like, you can just make up a totally fictitious parent block and use that to mine if you don't want to use a real parent chain.


PoS is already covered in our FAQ.

Good choice!

If you take a look at this Metrics report, you'll see all eight 24-hour periods in which Namecoin hashrate exceeded Bitcoin. https://metrics.namecoin.org/namecoin/period-timestamps-1-days/pool/charts/gt_parent.txt

The only consecutive 2-day period on that report is 12-13 November 2017. That was when BCH got into a hashwar with Bitcoin, with the purported goal of BCH being to prove that with more hashrate, it was the "real Bitcoin". Since Namecoin can use both Bitcoin and BCH as a parent chain, Namecoin wound up with a higher hashrate than either Bitcoin or BCH during those two days. When I tweeted about it, Samson Mow from Blockstream noticed my tweet and commented "Oh crap, now Namecoin is the real Bitcoin." So yeah that's what the shirt design is referencing -- a cool historical event in which Namecoin's ability to use multiple parent chains got demonstrated in practice.

The high price for the jackets is just because TeeSpring charges us a lot for those. That design is available on other products if you want something mildly cheaper. E.g. https://namecoin.creator-spring.com/listing/real-light-1482?product=389


The Namecoin.org Team page credits Satoshi in the "Pre-Genesis Researchers" section, along with other people like Dan Kaminsky (who definitely would not be considered a Namecoin developer). That section is for people who did interesting research that laid the groundwork for Namecoin, but never worked on Namecoin itself. https://www.namecoin.org/team/

Four Namecoin developers (including me) attended the Tor 2024 Lisbon meeting, GPN 22, and MoneroKon 4. Summary (including videos from GPN and MoneroKon) is here: https://www.namecoin.org/2024/07/24/tor-2024-gpn-22-monerokon-4-summary.html

On a less serious note, people sometimes ask me where they can get the Namecoin t-shirts that a few of us wear to conferences. They can be found on the Namecoin TeeSpring shop: https://namecoin.creator-spring.com/ . 8 designs are available ("Chains", "Connections", "Daughter", "MMO", "Real", "Revolutionary", "Shadow", and "Sidechain"), in various fits of short-sleeve, long-sleeve, hoodies, sweatshirts, and jackets, for men, women and kids. Profits support Namecoin dev, and it can be a fun way to spread the word. (If you don't understand the in-jokes in some of the designs, feel free to ask in this thread, I don't mind elaborating on them.)

Namecoin Core 22.0 is released; the Manage Names tab is back!  https://www.namecoin.org/2022/08/02/namecoin-core-22.0-released.html


I would draw a distinction between "NFT's" and the "NFT community".  I think it's pretty clear that Namecoin names meet the literal definition of NFT's.  Long before the term "NFT" entered the lexicon, I would explain the difference between Bitcoin and Namecoin to newcomers by saying that the "coins" in Bitcoin are fungible (notwithstanding the criticisms the Monero community would justifiably make) while in Namecoin they are not.  The problem is that the community that has latched onto the term "NFT" is largely made up of scammers, get-rich-quick speculators, and other people that I don't want hanging around Namecoin's spaces.  In particular, we're seeing what are basically blockchain spam attacks from that community, where they've artificially inflated the resale value of historical names in the d/ namespace such that it is now profitable to mass-squat on them with zero intention of ever using these names for real websites.  I've been told by multiple good-Samaritan squatters that they have been repeatedly approached by people from the NFT community who are asking to buy high-value names for "collector" purposes; all of those good-Samaritan squatters told the NFT "collectors" to get fucked.  This behavior from the NFT community is harmful and AFAIK none of the Namecoin community is happy about it.

(What's the betting on whether any of these NFT collectors who are buying up Punycode domains have any idea that there's an open ticket on Namecoin's GitHub for blacklisting Punycode domains on the application layer due to security concerns?)


Daniel's statement remains accurate as far as I know, unless "contributions" includes wasting developers' time on things that don't involve code.  By the way, that "Devoted One" user whom you screenshotted DM'ed me on Twitter saying he wanted to fund Namecoin development, a bit of discussion happened, and then he ghosted as soon as I said he would need to pay the funds into escrow up-front.  I can't *prove* that he was trying to scam the Namecoin developers into adding features he wanted without paying us, but he's not really doing a good job of making me think otherwise.