ASZ wrote:I'd like to thank you all for participating in a (to me) very interesting discussion.
I would like to make a few comments:
* Many of you keep mentioning OneName when speaking about squatting. From the wording of some posts it seems, as if OneName were the largest squatter. What makes you think this way? What if I could tell you that this assumption does not hold (due to the pseudoanonimity of Namecoin one can, however, never be a 100% sure)?
OneName representatives were bragging a few months ago that u/ was the namespace with the most registrations (more than d/ or id/). Given that almost all u/ names are registered by OneName (also by their own admission), it logically follows that OneName is one of the largest squatters, if not the largest, at least as of when they made that statement. Do you happen to have evidence to the contrary?
ASZ wrote:* Has anyone had any thoughts on the actual cause of increasing name squatting activities? Apart from the factors emerging from the focal idea of Namecoin, Bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies, i.e. the total absence of control, the economical factor IMHO plays a significant role in the mentioned development.
Some of you have argued that the renewal fees for Namecoin names are far too low. However, this does not pertain for the NMC costs for registering/updating names (0.01 reg. fees, 0.01 transaction fees), since we still measure the worth of Namecoin names in USD or the like. I dare to argue that raising renewal fees would only prove to be successful, if as a result the USD price for name operations were to rise.
The worth of NMC ( ~0.379 USD as of 04.09.2015 01:30) also affects name squatting in a further way, which unfortunately may be hard to prove and thus shall not mention here just yet.
You are correct; it's the USD price of a name that influences squatting behavior. This makes solutions more difficult, because an external data source (the NMC/USD exchange rate) must be taken into account, and blockchains suck at using external data sources. BitShares tries to solve this by using a multisig trusted party to determine exchange rates. For reasons that I hope are obvious, I am not a fan of that approach. Miner votes, or PoS votes, might be a better solution, although the exact attacks enabled by such methods are not very well understood.
ASZ wrote:* As of this writing and to the best of my knowledge, there exists no incentive for name squatters to refrain from bulk-registering Namecoin names.
Since name squatting has yet to be recognized as a major problem, it does not seem to affect the price directly (at least I found no actual proof, which would allow such assertions). It may, of course, cause 3rd party enterprises to step back from Namecoin as potential naming system, though I think we can all agree that the main cause lies with the current usability issues (please do not mistake this for criticism).
I agree with this. I can attest to the incentives favoring squatting, because I happen to be holding about 100 names for various friends and other organizations that I support. I'm an ethical squatter, in the sense that I will happily hand them over for
free when/if the rightful owner decides they want to use Namecoin, but the fact that the system is dependent on squatters being ethical, is not a good thing. But yes, I also totally agree that usability is a bigger issue than squatting, and is therefore a somewhat higher priority to deal with. However, there's nothing wrong with parallel efforts. If someone wants to propose improvements to the fee structure, I would happily engage them and provide feedback. (It just won't be the main thing I spend lots of time on yet.)