johnc wrote:It is safer in the sense that your domain cannot be seized
Please don't make baseless and reckless claims like this; doing so is unethical and reduces credibility of Namecoin. (To be clear, johnc doesn't represent the Namecoin developers.) I'm aware of multiple cases where Namecoin domains have been seized. Depending on an individual user's threat model, seizure of a Namecoin domain may be easier or more difficult than seizure of an ICANN-based domain name. It is certainly our goal to make seizure of names as difficult as possible, within the design constraints of Namecoin.
This is a topic that is covered in the FAQ:
https://namecoin.org/docs/faq/ . (See the "name stealing") section. Suggestions and pull requests for improving that section (or the FAQ generally) are very much welcome.
johnc wrote:and you can change the ip faster.
Assuming that the IP is stored in the blockchain, the speed of changing it is equivalent to the speed of issuing a Bitcoin transaction and then convincing someone that that Bitcoin transaction is valid. Depending on the threat model of the person looking up your domain, the amount of PoW needed to convince them may vary. Storing IP addresses in the blockchain may or may not scale well, depending on the use case and external factors.
For ICANN-based DNS, and for a Namecoin domain name which delegates the IP to a nameserver, the speed of updating the IP depends on the TTL of the record (as well as the behavior of any caching nameservers that might exist).
I think under most of the circumstances I've encountered in my personal usage, Namecoin updates faster. Your results may vary.
johnc wrote:It is not safer in the sense that your website (hosting, content) is neither anonymous or private.
That's true that Namecoin isn't anonymous. "Private" is an ambiguous term. Namecoin domains don't require a real name or email address to be registered (which might make them more private than ICANN-based domain names), but blockchain graph analysis (or P2P network wiretapping) might enable multiple Namecoin transactions to be linked (which is less private than ICANN-based DNS for some threat models). The values of Namecoin names (and their existence) are public and enumerable, which is also less private than ICANN-based DNS.
It's worth stating that we are actively working to improve privacy (including anonymity); there's nothing in the Namecoin design that inherently prevents anonymous registrations, and hiding the values or names of registrations from enumeration has been discussed (it would be an interesting kind of fork called a hard-soft-name-fork, which I need to post a thread about sometime).
From the context of names's post, it sounded to me like the question was specifically about encryption of traffic to a server that has a Namecoin domain; hence why I focused on that aspect in my previous post. @names, was my impression correct, or were you asking about a different aspect of "safety"?
Cheers.