Namecoin is a domain name registry service and was the first coin to fork Bitcoin. Similar to registering a .com or .io domain name, you register a .bit domain on the network. This domain is censorship-resistant and what is namecoin impervious to activity tracking. In practice, the top level domain is used by a handful of functional websites. Namecoin's developers indicated several potential uses and applications for this experimental token.

A peer-to-peer network similar to handles Namecoin's transactions, balances and issuance through a based proof-of-work scheme . Investing in cryptocurrencies and other Initial Coin Offerings (“ICOs”) is highly risky and speculative, and this article is not a recommendation by Investopedia or the writer to invest in cryptocurrencies or other ICOs. Since each individual's situation is unique, a qualified professional should always be consulted before making any financial decisions. Investopedia makes no representations or warranties as to the accuracy or timeliness of the information contained herein.

Notably, however, NMC can be mined as ‘merge-mining’, where NMC are generated as a by-product of mining BTC. In this way, a miner is able to generate NMC while also mining BTC. However, without specialized hardware, such as ASICs for BTC mining, miners should probably seek out a more CPU-friendly coin to mine. When you’re ready to sell your Namecoin tokens, the same above steps are followed, only in reverse. Poloniex and Shapeshift will allow you to transfer your Namecoin tokens back into Bitcoin. Then, you can use a Bitcoin ATM to convert to a fiat currency, withdraw money in USD, and complete your Namecoin cashout.

What is Namecoin?

The Mastercoin protocol is gradually transitioning from using the specialized exodus address and multi-signatures to using the OP_RETURN bitcoin operator to encode transaction metadata. To demonstrate the use of colored coins, we have created a set of 20 colored coins with symbol “MasterBTC” that represent coupons for a free copy of this book shown in Example 9-1. Namecoin can accomplish this and more, because of the decentralized DNS system.

Note that there was a previous alt coin named Bytecoin with currency symbol BTE, whereas the CryptoNote-derived Bytecoin has the currency symbol BCN. Bytecoin uses the Cryptonight proof-of-work algorithm, which requires access to at least 2 MB of RAM per instance, making it unsuitable for GPU or ASIC mining. Bytecoin inherits ring signatures, unlinkable transactions, and blockchain analysis–resistant anonymity from CryptoNote. The resulting https://cryptolisting.org/ currency is touted as “silver to bitcoin’s gold” and is intended as a light-weight alternative currency. Due to the faster confirmation time and the 84 million total currency limit, many adherents of Litecoin believe it is better suited for retail transactions than bitcoin. There is also talk of developing Namecoin applications that could be used for voting, bonds, stocks, shares, notary services, proof of existence, and file signatures.

A Taxonomy of Alternative Currencies and Chains

Through the Namecoin-based applications nmcontrol and ncdns, it is also possible to create your own private or public DNS. Your DNS can be privately shared with friends, or it can be used by other Namecoin users. Users who are looking for a secure and protected coin should consider Namecoin as a strong option. Namecoin has been named by experts as one of the most secure cryptocurrencies in existence. This is because there are only two ways that any entity could compromise the Namecoin network and the data inside of it.

In most real world cases, lawyers, copyright holders, etc., will simply contact the domain's registrar. However, the potential for commands from a central authority should be of concern to groups who will suffer due to censorship. Needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding. CoinCentral’s owners, writers, and/or guest post authors may or may not have a vested interest in any of the above projects and businesses. None of the content on CoinCentral is investment advice nor is it a replacement for advice from a certified financial planner. The project may see a resurgence as websites move away from controlling DNS providers.

No one collects the fee; it gets used for the maintenance and creation of other decentralized public services. You must renew your domain name after 35,999 blocks, which usually takes between 200 and 250 days. Litecoin is an altcoin that was created to become the “silver” to Bitcoin’s “gold”. While the average time to confirm a transaction in the Bitcoin network is just over 10 minutes, the Litecoin network takes about 2.5 minutes. Litecoin had originally also set out to make access to mining easier for the average user. Litecoin uses a cryptographic algorithm fundamentally different to Bitcoin, called Scrypt.

The cryptocurrency community definition of an altcoin is one that is not Bitcoin. Some include Ethereum in the definition as well, so Namecoin is an altcoin. Namecoin payments are published on a public blockchain, but the sender, recipient, and amount of a transaction remain private. In fact, there have been lots of altcoins after the launch of Bitcoin which failed or weren’t intended to survive in the first place, in many cases because they were launched as scam projects or pump-and-dump coins. Thus, participants become part of a “pay-it-forward” system of transactions in a structure called the “Tangle”. No other financial rewards are offered, the network is fee-free and allows for high scalability.

Does Namecoin Still Exist?

When creating a .bit domain name, no personal information is required of you, so that no entity can obtain any information that can be used against you as the holder of Namecoin or a .bit domain name. Additionally, each .bit domain name comes with a private key that must be kept in “cold storage”, which is to say that a physical, paper copy of the key must be kept safe somewhere in the physical world. Namecoin was the first fork of Bitcoin, the first coin to implement merged mining, and one of the oldest blockchain projects around.

• Namecoin's fork was initiated to create a new way to establish ownership of the human-readable addresses assigned to the machine-readable addresses used on the web—domain names.
• NMC is available for BTC on Poloniex; however, it has almost no trading volume so getting your order filled may be difficult.
• As long as there are volunteers running the customised DNS server software for the rest of us, then we can always access any alternative domains.
• However, larger, more well-known projects will probably be the choice of those that end up making the switch.
• Investing in cryptocurrencies and other Initial Coin Offerings (“ICOs”) is highly risky and speculative, and this article is not a recommendation by Investopedia or the writer to invest in cryptocurrencies or other ICOs.

The first way would be to close down the operation of all internet providers. We all know that this is impossible without a significant global collapse, in which the attacking entity itself would likely be compromised. Emercoin also has a DNS with multiple domain zones – .coin for cryptocurrency, .emc for Emercoin-related material, .lib for content libraries, and .bazar for trading platforms. There are only a couple of other notable blockchain projects creating a decentralized DNS. Ethereum has the Ethereum Name Service that provides practically the same function as Namecoin except using Ethereum smart contracts.

Buying/Selling Namecoin On Cryptocurrency Exchanges

Several alt coins have been spawned from CryptoNote, including Bytecoin , Aeon , Boolberry , duckNote , Fantomcoin , Monero , MonetaVerde , and Quazarcoin . CryptoNote is also notable for being a complete ground-up implementation of a crypto-currency, not a fork of bitcoin. Blackcoin was introduced in February 2014 and uses a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm. It is also notable for introducing “multipools,” a type of mining pool that can switch between different alt coins automatically, depending on profitability.

The Namecoin price today is $1.40 USD with a 24 hour trading volume of $8.41K USD. Circulating supply shows the number of coins or tokens that have been issued so far. The total dollar value of all transactions for this asset over the past 24 hours. Cointelegraph spoke to Michael Dean, BipCoin developer, about the future of censorship-proof domains. Yes, this technology can be abused just like anything else, and so it's even more imperative that we all have the capability to view the .bit namespace so that we're aware of the good and the bad.

Users of Vaultoro are now able to purchase physical gold with Bitcoin and 35+ altcoins, including Dogecoin, Litecoin, Namecoin, Monero and others. The bitcoin gold exchange integrated the ShapeShift API on June 3. The chances are that 99% of the people reading this do not need to create a .bit website or service. However, information is power as the saying goes, and so it is important that you have the capability to access websites and email addresses on the .bit namespace.

Some alt coins attempt to achieve broad distribution and use as currencies. Others are laboratories for experimenting on different features and monetary models. To evaluate alt coins, I look at their defining characteristics and their market metrics. For every alt coin mentioned in this chapter, 50 or more will go unmentioned, eliciting howls of anger from their creators and fans.

Checking if the site connection is secure

The critical difference in Namecoin is that tokens are used up as domain names are registered. The cost of one domain name to Namecoin's usable supply is .01 NMC. The Pantos project, on the other hand, has set out to provide new standards for decentralised cross-chain token transfers. The objective of Pantos technology is to enable the transfer of assets from one blockchain to another. In this chapter, we will concentrate primarily on the technical characteristics and innovation potential of alt coins represented by the first set of questions. In the next section we will examine a few notable alt coins, such as Litecoin, Dogecoin, Freicoin, Primecoin, Peercoin, Darkcoin, and Zerocoin.

With a third-party provider you avoid the need to run a Namecoin client, but you lose the independent control of a decentralized name registry offered by Namecoin. It supplements scrypt-based proof of work with subsidies for participation in BOINC open grid computing. Gridcoin uses BOINC as a general-purpose computing platform, rather than to solve specific science problems such as prime numbers or protein folding. Peercoin was introduced in August 2012 and is the first alt coin to use a hybrid proof-of-work and proof-of-stake algorithm to issue new currency.

The key d/example signifies a record stored in the DNS namespace d with the name example and corresponds to the record for the example.bit website. The content of d/example is expected to conform to the DNS namespace specification.As of 2015, the fee for a record was 0.01 NMC and records expired after blocks (~200 days) unless updated or renewed. Ethereum is a blockchain-based software platform with the native coin, ether. Ethereum smart contracts support a variety of distributed apps across the crypto ecosystem. Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency created in August 2017 in a hard-fork blockchain split from Bitcoin.

Namecoin has an active team of developers and support personnel who work to continue improving the blockchain, use cases, and appeal to users. In this case, the name/value pair is a computer-readable numeric address with a human-readable name. A token for the name/value pair is created, and the token holder owns the name/value pair. Thus, a Namecoin is used to establish ownership of a domain name.

It also is the first alt coin featuring auto-exchange to bitcoin for payment in bitcoin from the wallet. Finally, there are a number of bitcoin contenders that offer digital currency or digital payment networks, but without using a decentralized ledger or consensus mechanism based on proof of work, such as Ripple and others. These non–blockchain technologies are outside the scope of this book and will not be covered in this chapter. Namecoin can also be used to improve the infrastructure of the internet. Because it’s built on a blockchain which is open-sourced, the web browsers and domains that are utilizing Namecoin will be as well.