Are Namecoins obsolete with upcoming 0.9 release of Bitcoin?

[dtrneaiu]

After I have read this article¹ (Smart Property, Colored Coins and Mastercoin) on coindesk I guess that Namecoin is obsolete. I have read about the possible use cases for Namecoin² and as far as I understand coindesk, it tells that Bitcoin version 0.9 will have the same features. Well the difference seems to be that they (Bitcoin) support only 80 bytes of data instead of the 520 Namecoin provides.

1. Is that true, that Bitcoin 0.9 will have the same features Namecoin has?
2. Will Namecoin still have any special quality compared to Bitcoin, that justifies Namecoins’ continued existence?
   Or in other words: Is the low value (compared to Bitcoins) of Namecoins the only advantage over Bitcoins, because messages, notary acts, votings etc. are much cheaper and therefore only affordable with Namecoin?

¹) http://www.coindesk.com/smart-property- ... astercoin/
²) http://dot-bit.org/Use_cases

[Ben]

I don't think this will effect Namecoin in the slightest. They both serve very different purposes, Bitcoin is a currency and Namecoin maps names to values. 80 bytes is not enough to do much with and will probably be immediately pruned. I'm not seeing the overlap here.

[domob]

I don't think this will effect Namecoin in the slightest. They both serve very different purposes, Bitcoin is a currency and Namecoin maps names to values. 80 bytes is not enough to do much with and will probably be immediately pruned. I'm not seeing the overlap here.

This. Also, Bitcoin's extension basically just allows (very limited and awkward) extensions, but does not implement name handling at all. You would have to re-implement Namecoin based on the Bitcoin blockchain first. Not sure if someone intends to do that, but I would consider it a waste of resources; in particular as Namecoin can share Bitcoin's hashing power also with a separate blockchain via merge-mining. I think this is a much cleaner solution that trying to put everything into the Bitcoin blockchain that is not intended/designed to be used for those things (not even with the upcoming change, which just makes it a bit better).

[traister]

After I have read this article¹ (Smart Property, Colored Coins and Mastercoin) on coindesk I guess that Namecoin is obsolete. I have read about the possible use cases for Namecoin² and as far as I understand coindesk, it tells that Bitcoin version 0.9 will have the same features. Well the difference seems to be that they (Bitcoin) support only 80 bytes of data instead of the 520 Namecoin provides.

Is that true, that Bitcoin 0.9 will have the same features Namecoin has?
Will Namecoin still have any special quality compared to Bitcoin, that justifies Namecoins’ continued existence?
Or in other words: Is the low value (compared to Bitcoins) of Namecoins the only advantage over Bitcoins, because messages, notary acts, votings etc. are much cheaper and therefore only affordable with Namecoin

This. Also, Bitcoin's extension basically just allows (very limited and awkward) extensions, but does not implement name handling at all. You would have to re-implement Namecoin based on the Bitcoin blockchain first. Not sure if someone intends to do that, but I would consider it a waste of resources; in particular as Namecoin can share Bitcoin's hashing power also with a separate blockchain via merge-mining. I think this is a much cleaner solution that trying to put everything into the Bitcoin blockchain that is not intended/designed to be used for those things (not even with the upcoming change, which just makes it a bit better).

Yes this will not affect NMC and the reason why NMC even exists is because it was decided it was in the best interest to create a new coin rather then add a DNS to bitcoin! Although they did not want to create a totally new coin that would be in competition with bitcoin, which is how they came up with NMC being merge mined and on a seperate block so that BTC and NMC do not interfear with eachother. This was actually an idea from Satoshi himself before NMC was ever created! If you are interested in the the routes from where NMC came from then you can check here. This is how it all began!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic ... 6#msg28696