Short description
Namecoin is an experimental open-source technology which improves decentralization, security, censorship resistance, privacy, and speed of certain components of the Internet infrastructure such as DNS and identities.
Abstract
Namecoin is an alternative cryptocurrency, or altcoin, modeled after Bitcoin [4]. Furthermore, it is the first altcoin in the sense that it was the first to create its own block chain, separate from Bitcoin’s. Namecoin shares many similarities with Bitcoin, including the same method for proof-of-work, the same coin cap, the same block creation time, and all of the same transaction operations (with a few additions). Namecoin was inspired after discussions about a BitDNS [5] protocol using a block chain to manage a domain name lookup service. The motivation was that a central authority managing domain names, such as ICANN, requires too much trust in a single entity and represents a single point of failure. The first Namecoin block was mined in April 2011, and as of this writing, over 215,000 total blocks have been mined in the Namecoin system. Because of its similarities with Bitcoin, Namecoin was able to be mergemined and has been merge-mined with Bitcoin since October 8, 2011 (see the next subsection).