About Namecoin

Homepage: https://wwww.namecoin.org/ | https://namecoin.bit/

Namecoin is an open-source technology which improves decentralization, security, censorship resistance, privacy and speed of critical components of the internet infrastructure such as the DNS and identities along with PKI (Public Key Infrastructure).

Without DNS (Domain Name System) the internet would not be as we know it today; instead of remembering google.com people would have to remember stuff like 172.217.20.46 or 2a00:1450:400f:806::200e. Websites addresses would be unrecognizable as such, this would make it far more difficult for a genuine and good online resource to reach all the people who would benefit from finding such online resources. This issue was solved by organizations like Verisign and ICANN who under IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) built a centralized service that maps human readable names to more complex data structures such as IP addresses. These services are called domain names and are pooled in many TOP Level Domains (such as .com, .net, .org, .eu, .de, .fr, etc.). The resulted system is centralized, not censorship resistant at all and subject to potential abuse. Since these records have to be enforced by some third party, they can be (and are) subject to censorship at the registrar level (e.g. GoDaddy), an organizations that owns and operates the TLD, ICANN itself or even a state-level actor. All have their own set of “updatable” terms and conditions under which a domain can be terminated/seized/censored at any time.

With the recent wave of social media deplatforming taking place, censorship and free speech suppression attempts, it is becoming abundantly clear, to more than just technologists, we must make it a priority to protect online privacy and secure free speech and at the same time make these two accessible to the general public. In order to properly implement end-to-end encryption, a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) is needed. In the past, some corporations were given permission to issue “trusted” certificates, which are public/private key pairs that allow site or service owners to digitally sign data and confirm to users that they are a) reading the right text; b) are on the correct website / server and c) their communication is end-to-end encrypted and authenticated. These were of course also centralized, not censorship resistant at all, subject to abuse from both the operator and potential state-level actors and under the control of the organization which owns / operates the CA – this obviously creates an avenue for abuse and especially in cryptography trust in a certain entity/person or group is to be considered a “single point of failure”. Namecoin addresses the end-to-end encryption and authentication without relying on public CAs and without the need for any third party at all.

Namecoin is one of the very few crypto-coins that actually has a working finite service available for the general public: secure, decentralized, unrestricted, censorship resistant identities under the .BIT TLD which comes with the additional advantage to each user being its own certificate authority for TLS certificates (HTTPS end-to-end-encryption). Namecoin is the only “altcoin” that “Satoshi Nakamoto” (creator of Bitcoin) contributed to and is mined along with Bitcoin using “AuxPow”.

Currently, there are parts on the internet that are much more complex to remember for a human than IP addresses, such as (only a few examples, there are so many others):

-- Tor addresses (location hidden, anonymous and censorship resistant, accessible only within the Tor network):
5tqw3kwwuy7sf3zhdpvz6valtyjnbsuxasx52afnuezr6hkmbsnqrtad.onion

-- Freenet addresses (anonymously updated and hosted in distributed pieces across a network of thousands of nodes that offer a “datastore”):
USK@WMa1Z40iYdZZ51yctQ3toFl9zuuFEnNdsm3NejJU5KE, jCBcaNBeKD5~sSQeSkyKz737Bh5ibBGqdzfD8mgfdMY, AQACAAE/statistics/763/

-- User identity information (crucial for end-to-end securely encrypted and authenticated communications such as PGP key fingerprints: FDF5 1788 B4C2 2C11 CA8F 6C79 0001 0AE3 8394 0A42 or OTR keys A5F12F3F 17447F7B A5EF91E4 99FB69C9 85041C90.

Namecoin addresses these flaws by registering human meaningful domain names on the blockchain under its own .BIT TLD. Instead of having to remember a complex data structure in order to use a secure service, or to make sure you are talking to the right person, or to make sure you are reading the correct text, or to know for sure that you connect to the desired end point (website or server for example), you will gain the exactly same security by just having to remember alice.bit d/alice id/alice or bob.bit d/bob id/bob. The mapping from human-meaningful name to computer complex name is kept on the namecoin blockchain, decentralized and 100% censorship resistant, secured by miners against double registration or hijack.

Namecoin was made possible by “Satoshi Nakamoto”, creator of Bitcoin, it is the only “altcoin” that has a contribution from the creator of Bitcoin. It was initially proposed under the name BitDNS in 2010 – the idea was highly appreciated and immediately seen as a real benefit so “AuxPow” was invented and added to Bitcoin, especially for Namecoin’s use. In 2011, Namecoin became the first fork of Bitcoin and remains to this day one of the most innovative altcoins; a token with true utility to the real world. Namecoin was the first solution to Zooko’s Triangle, the long-standing problem of producing a naming system that is simultaneously secure, decentralized, censorship-resistant and human-meaningful.

PROJECT WHITEPAPER
There is no single “Namecoin whitepaper”, as Namecoin’s design is not attributable to a single person. There do, however, exist several whitepaper-ish documents by pre-genesis researchers:
- https://www.namecoin.org/resources/whitepaper/
- https://namecoin.bit/resources/whitepaper/

Fullnode-console service provided by https://dotbit.zone/

We provide a fullnode-console web service so that you can send commands to our Namecoin Core full node daemon.

We pvoide them in 2 (two) formats in order to easily integrate with other services and exchanges.:
-- JSON (application/json)at https://dotbit.zone/fullnode-console/#param
-- text (text/plain) at https://dotbit.zone/fullnode-console-txt/#param

These are the currently supported commands, contact us if you need something else:

getblockchaininfo | getnetworkinfo | getmempoolinfo | gettxoutsetinfo

Each param can be called any of its sub-params or even sub-sub-params (as per how the data is structured) in order to get a single result, for example:
gettxoutsetinfo?amount?total

Example links for JSON:
-- https://dotbit.zone/fullnode-console/getblockchaininfo
-- https://dotbit.zone/fullnode-console/gettxoutsetinfo
-- https://dotbit.zone/fullnode-console/gettxoutsetinfo?amount?total
-- https://dotbit.zone/fullnode-console/getblockchaininfo?blocks

Example links for PLAIN TEXT:
-- https://dotbit.zone/fullnode-console-txt/getblockchaininfo
-- https://dotbit.zone/fullnode-console-txt/gettxoutsetinfo
-- https://dotbit.zone/fullnode-console-txt/gettxoutsetinfo?amount?total
-- https://dotbit.zone/fullnode-console-txt/getblockchaininfo?blocks

Coin specific data

-- Name: Namecoin
-- Symbol: NMC
-- Subunits: 1 / 100000000 (OR 0.00000001)
-- Blockchain ledger start date: 18.04-(APRIL).2011
-- Mineable: YES; Hash function: SHA-256
AuxPOW (Auxiliary Proof-of-Work) Bitcoin merged mining - this means everyone who mines Bitcoin can include Namecoin mining totally free of cost.
-- Max. supply: 21.000.000 NMC (twenty-one million whole unit coins)

Full node implementation: Namecoin-Core
Open source, actively maintained, cross platform (Windows / Linux / Mac / BSD), inlcludes wallet, includes graphical user interface, security and code review from upstream forked Bitcoin-Core, code available:
https://github.com/namecoin/namecoin-core/

Light-weight fast wallet for users that do not want or need a full node with the entire Namecoin blockchain:

Electrum-NMC
Open source, cross platform (Windows / Linux / Mac / BSD), available on Mobile devices (Android), includes graphical user interface, actively developed:
https://github.com/namecoin/electrum-nmc

Find more software that is needed to browse .BIT domains such as DNSSEC-HSTS, ncp11, dns-prop279 (Integration with Tor Browser), ncprop279 (smaller and more efficient Tor Browser integration) on Namecoin's beta downloads page: https://www.namecoin.org/download/betas/

By-design gradual reduction of circulating supply: Currently, for every .bit domain name or identity registered on the Namecoin blockchain 0.01 `NMC` are burnt (destroyed forever) which means it is deducted from the total supply. We think this has a good effect currently on the ecosystem: it basically gives something in exchange for something else stored on the Namecoin blockchain (identity or domain name) and as the demand in identities and/or domain names increases, the total circulating supply slowly decreases in a planned, known and expected way, so the market economics can work to dynamically equilibrate the ecosystem. Please note that this might change in the future (the required amount of 0.01 NMC required for a registration could be changed to something different should the value of 1 NMC change so that bulletproof, privacy oriented and impossible to censor domain names and identities remain accessible to the general public, not just well funded legal entities or users. Also, the miners could collect the coins used for registration instead of being permanently destroyed), however this will be only done by reaching a consensus in the community and only to the benefit of the project and will be done over a reasonable period of time.

We like, use and endorse:

Freenet / Hyphanet www.hyphanet.org

Tor www.torproject.org

AirVPN www.airvpn.org

Debian Linux www.debian.org

GnuPG www.gnupg.org

Tails Linux tails.net