Registrar Community Engagement

[indolering]

I feel that registrars need to be more actively engaged with the community and vice-versa. Many Namecoin people strongly dislike registrars, but they will always be around and I think a policy of engagement can lead to a much outcome for everyone!

Registrars have a somewhat rocky history both in relation to the .bit domain and on ICANN sites. I have to admit that I don't know the full backstory, so I would love it if someone could provide some sort of overview of .bit registrars and how they have interacted with the Namecoin community in the past.

That being said, I would like to propose that the registrars form a working group or some other formal way of collaborating with the community on security practices, establishing a code of conduct, and contributing to the core codebase.

From our side, I think we can help police adherence to the security standards and code of conduct through inclusion of registrars in official Namecoin software and on the website.

[dotbitme]

I run the .bit registrar dotbit.me, whose raison d'etre is to be a quick and easy way for new users to get into namecoin and the .bit name space. I hope and believe I have accomplished just that and been a small but positive addition to the namecoin community. The recent Chrome extension, the block explorer and the domain trading section have all been very popular and have a relatively large user base.

I recognize and appreciate the peer-to-peer nature of namecoin and registering a domain name via a registrar introduces a single point of failure. If the registrar goes down you lose your domain just like a lot of people lost their crypto coins on failed hosted wallets or trading sites. But right now the question is more about the future of namecoin and the need for more people getting into the crypto-currency, supporting further development. I believe growing the community and making the domain registration process as easy and appealing as possible is important or even vital at this stage.

Let's be frank: The future of namecoin right now is not overly bright. The development of the core software needs more work but the competent developers we do have are too few and do not have the time or motivation to work extensively on the project. The technological improvements to other crypto coins are moving along at a huge pace and the unique advantage namecoin had in the past (peer-to-peer key/value registration) are being done in new and perhaps better ways by newer solutions. I still hope namecoin can find a niche where it serves an important part in the crypto-coin universe, be it for domains, identification or something else.

Anyway, what I am trying to say is that "working group" for registrars or similar might be a good thing but before I put time and effort in that direction I need to know namecoin will survive.

Regards,
Tagide
dotbit.me

[kurt]

"The development of the core software needs more work but the competent developers we do have are too few and do not have the time or motivation to work extensively on the project. The technological improvements to other crypto coins are moving along at a huge pace and the unique advantage namecoin had in the past (peer-to-peer key/value registration) are being done in new and perhaps better ways by newer solutions"


Is there even a plan ?

[indolering]

"The development of the core software needs more work but the competent developers we do have are too few and do not have the time or motivation to work extensively on the project. The technological improvements to other crypto coins are moving along at a huge pace and the unique advantage namecoin had in the past (peer-to-peer key/value registration) are being done in new and perhaps better ways by newer solutions"


Is there even a plan ?

Yes, there are many plans and the future is bright.

We are very close to getting NMC development going full throttle. All of the organizational bottlenecks (github, website, domain name, hosting) have finally been removed. I've been around for about a year now, long before the alt-coin explosion, and there is more activity now than I have ever seen.

I'm actively applying to grants to fund code development and community organizing for myself and Domob for a year. Anything in addition to that would enable us to hire other developers to take on additional tasks.

Domob is actively working on the rebase, I stopped bugging him for status updates in the hopes that he would focus on coding. It's hard to pin his progress down to any one repo, as he is upstreaming many changes directly to Libcoin. However, we are talking months if not weeks.

Libcoin already reimplemented Namecoin, we just need to create some function calls and port the miner code and wallet code. Kraken is paying people to maintaining this Namecoin port, so we can focus on improvements from now on.

I'm working on writing client libraries from scratch in Haxe, which will give us client libraries in Java, C#, JavaScript, PHP, C++ and experimental/partial support for Python, Ruby, and Go.

Namecoin.org will get transferred over to Domob sometime after the 29th and Khal gave us access to the backend. The sys-ops guy may have the f*cking SSL warning fixed by the end of the weekend (although I think we should just wait until the 29th).

If you are still skeptical, consider this: it would cost at a bare minimum $60,000 to fund Domob and myself for a year. There are several grants that will cover the $30-$40K range, which would cover just my work. However, even if we can't get those grants, we might be able to raise the funds privately. You can check out this spreadsheet I put together outlining the payback period for investing in Namecoin developers. I've also attached a chart from said spreadsheet showing the amount of money one would need to invest in Namecoin and sold at a given exchange rate to recoup a $60,0000 investment.

It would only cost $8,000 to cover development costs for 1 year if that $8,000 was sold when usd->nmc hits $15 (the peak Namecoin's peak price). It's only $2,400 if you think NMC will hit $50. There are ~50 Namecoin wallets with enough money to fund that amount on it's own.

[MWD]

Let's be frank: The future of namecoin right now is not overly bright.

didn't want to hijack, started a new thread:
http://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1792