What is the crowd's opinion of NameCoin?

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You could make a bitcoin fork that lets you commit hashes to a central chain that users can index like a hashmap to find content. Such a chain would not necessarily be a bittorrent only protocol, since ipfs and TOR can benefit from name services like that too. Namecoin already exists and can possibly fill that role. What you would do is either commit novel entries, or commit tags that point to existing entries. So you can upload an ISO file with its canonical name and future transactions can point tags to it describing it, like "Ubuntu" or "16.04" or even "fake".

It would be a giant mess to parse though, since you need to keep the canonical chain in order of block allocation while having a hashmap into it of all the tags and corresponding data.

That is correct, the information that ties the .bit domain you register is only modifiable through your keys.

https://namecoin.info/?p=video

Much like you can't "take" Bitcoin away from anyone if their keys are kept, in, for example, a "cold storage". Or you could even make a brain wallet in order to have no paper or electronic data laying around with the info on it.

Third parties even have options for you to be able to do it without having to have any actual Namecoin, utilizing any of the existing coins tradeable on shapshift:

https://getdotbit.com/

While encryption will continue to be used and strengthened, I think you are spot on with your assessment of the sad state of certificate authorities. Those companies are living on borrowed time, and they will be replaced by a better technology in the future.

The only alternative I've seen so far is namecoin's implementation of the .bit domain. Domain names there, once created, cannot be seized, shut down, or interfered with in any way by someone who does not hold the corresponding coin/encryption keys. Certificates are created and held by the holder of the domain itself and stored with the domain name itself, they can only be changed by the holder of the keys. This effectively denies all forms of third party interference with the ownership of the names and the keys.

It's still a young technology but what a great idea - a cheap decentralized DNS replacement with a built-in decentralized CA replacement, riding on an anonymized transaction network (better than private DNS registrations, anyway). Going forward, this is the kind of technology that will take the ownership of the internet and its security out of the hands of governments and corporations. Imagine their frustration at being unable to seize domain names or compromise security certificates.

For now you need a plugin to resolve the .bit domains, but there are some nameservers out there that have integrated .bit and support looking it up via regular DNS.

I don't know any blogs or sites, but Namecoin is very interesting. https://namecoin.info/ Its a bit hard to set up for non tech users, if it proves to be promising hopefully someone will make it so its easy for the average user to set up and use.

Well, there's Namecoin, but the folks at KAT would have to register there. If their IP is staying put when their domain names are are seized, you could always add an entry in your hosts file.

I agree with your proposals but $ is the difference, many of this coins had bounties paid with "premine" or were IPO coins like NXT etc.

NMC has a bounty program but very few people donate to the NMDF Namecoin Marketing and Development Fund.

NMC developers are mostly volunteers. I moderate here all day because i'm unemployed, etc.

> Either way, foreign or corporate control means a real loss for us, the people.

Any control means a real loss. We should have a completely decentralized DNS.

Like Namecoin.

(if this is the correct interpretation of block chain in this thread) they have also been applied when you need a loose sense of timing (A happened before/after B happened) in a distributed system (that is, there isn't a central authority deciding which happened first). You can't rely on adding a timestamp here because anyone can just add a timestamp that's in the past.

There have been some other experiments into where this blockchain might be useful, one of the earliest is (namecoin)[https://namecoin.info/] that allows you to register domain names. The block chain is used to make sure that the domain name you're trying to register hasn't already been taken by someone else. This is done similarly to verifying that you haven't already sent these coins to someone else in bitcoin.

> I'm not really sure that this is a big deal. After all, the purpose of strong encryption is to eliminate the threat of content being compromised when in the hands of anyone who does not possess the private key.

While this is true, every encryption isn't fail safe, or even future-proof. With enough encrypted material and computation power, every encryption is breakable (be it just by a stupid brute-force). Therefore it is important to keep the number of people who have access to the encrypted text to a minimum.
Also since your protocol is using PGP, if one of your user's private key is made public, it will be impossible for him/her to deny anything they've said. Using emails with PGP doesn't bear (theoretically) this risk since the content of the email is supposed to stay private.

> This is, indeed, a problem. One I should note exists with any public key server. It is the responsibility of the sender to verify the validity of a given public key, via web of trust or otherwise. Perhaps, baking web of trust into the protocol could alleviate some of the potential risk here.

Indeed, there is no silver bullet for this problem. But as long as you give the end user the means to verify the identity of their contacts (manual fingerprint verification, public key import, web of trust, ect...), I think that it should be fine. Maybe you can have a look at Namecoin; using the blockchain might be easier to integrate in your protocol instead of the web of trust.

Well then good luck for your protocol!