I have been looking at *coins for a while and the implications of the blockchain-based concensus system are interesting.
The system really maps the real world onto computers very well, in that it reduces what used to be technical issues to "political" issues. These systems work on concensus, and as such, require a significant amount of interested parties to work in the expected way. They are very much subject to network effects that only occur after critical mass is reached.
Blockchains are being used to implement solutions to different problems, and they could really solve some significant problems such as decentralized identity and reputation management (!). The difficulty lies in creating a significant enough "currency" so that miners will become involved and make the blockchain stable and reliable.
Bitcoin is a currency in a much stronger sense than namecoin or any other of "not-really-money-coins" around. I wonder if piggybacking on bitcoin might actually be the solution for this situation (i.e introduce other information in the bitcoin blockchain instead of using a brand new one).
Sadly, adding external information to the blockchain could be construed as "spamming the blockchain" and therefore not deemed worthy for inclusion in the bitcoin blockchain by miners. So there is a big challenge there.
If you are interested in this topic and want to work on related projects feel free to reach out (google my username).
> Blockchains are being used to implement solutions to different problems, and they could really solve some significant problems such as decentralized identity and reputation management (!). The difficulty lies in creating a significant enough "currency" so that miners will become involved and make the blockchain stable and reliable.
Author of the original article here. Namecoin is actually merge-mined with Bitcoin, so miner participation is not a serious problem. There's no way you could have known that without happening to know that, though, and I agree that this is an issue for a lot of new blockchain-based technologies.
Maybe I've misunderstood it, but how does merge mining create an incentive to mine namecoins? I figured all it did was make it "cheaper" to mine namecoins by "reusing" work done for the bitcoin blockchain. In order for the namecoin network to function, you still need to actively get involved with it.
Merged mining has good incentives since it basically gives free money; for the same work of mining Bitcoin you can mine Bitcoin and Namecoin simultaneously.
I'm not too sure. A lot of people in the cryptocurrency community are saying that something like Namecoin is going to be the second major blockchain-based technology after payments, so maybe it just got the right kind of press at the right time, as you say.
What I'm interested in the most would be a new way to do Email. P2P and secure. I can't believe that most of us are still sending Email unencrypted but then again can you really blame us? PGP has failed not only in its main use case (trust in people, really?) but most of all in terms of usablity.
The system really maps the real world onto computers very well, in that it reduces what used to be technical issues to "political" issues. These systems work on concensus, and as such, require a significant amount of interested parties to work in the expected way. They are very much subject to network effects that only occur after critical mass is reached.
Namecoin, in particular, was subject to a major security issue last year: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ohyom/fatal_flaw_i...
Blockchains are being used to implement solutions to different problems, and they could really solve some significant problems such as decentralized identity and reputation management (!). The difficulty lies in creating a significant enough "currency" so that miners will become involved and make the blockchain stable and reliable.
Bitcoin is a currency in a much stronger sense than namecoin or any other of "not-really-money-coins" around. I wonder if piggybacking on bitcoin might actually be the solution for this situation (i.e introduce other information in the bitcoin blockchain instead of using a brand new one).
Sadly, adding external information to the blockchain could be construed as "spamming the blockchain" and therefore not deemed worthy for inclusion in the bitcoin blockchain by miners. So there is a big challenge there.
If you are interested in this topic and want to work on related projects feel free to reach out (google my username).