Author: Khalahan 2011-12-16 17:23:36
Published on: 2011-12-16T17:23:36+00:00
Namecoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer name/value datastore system, specifically designed to map names to other things in a fully decentralized way. It is not limited to .bit usage and mapping directly to .bit URL is not the optimal way of using Namecoin. Namecoin is as proven and secure as Bitcoin and uses merged mining to provide a secure network. It has many advantages over systems like DNS and HTTPS as it has no single point of failure and can be used for various purposes. Namecoin uses a system of namespaces to separate each usage and is easily connectable to Bitcoin as both use RPC and json to exchange information. Extensible and not limited, it allows additional security with the addition of a certificate fingerprint combined with an https URL. It is simple for simple cases and allows the possibility to use nicknames, email addresses, or domains as names. Other methods to get bitcoin addresses can be added later, and the protocol is extensible.Examples of possible registered names include individual persons with well-known public addresses and merchants accepting payments in bitcoin, namecoin, paypal, or other coins. The personal namespace draft could be extended to support mapping to a bitcoin address, or a dedicated namespace can be used if preferred. There are several possibilities of address syntax, including khal, khal at dot-bit.org, mymerchant.com, mymerchant2, namecoin:mymerchant2, and namecoin://mymerchant2.To process an address to pay to in the Bitcoin client, RPC is sent to Namecoin for the specific name, and json processing is done for the corresponding bitcoin address. In case of an error, the system follows a set of steps until it gets the correct result. Bitcoin already has code and a protocol for transactions to IP addresses, which can be reused for dynamic address lookup. A few changes are necessary to enable complete user at server.com handling, including extending the protocol so that reply messages can be signed by a fixed public key, extending checkorder messages, and enabling DNS lookups for IP transactions.
Updated on: 2023-06-04T21:53:33.093057+00:00