davux wrote:We're thinking in a biased way here, because of tens of years of DNS, centralized training.
What if the traditional web didn't have any TLDs? For example, instead of connecting to "mtgox.com", we would simply use "mtgox".
It would have been easier for everyone, but centralization would have been the big issue: having only one root would mean all the control (and the money) would belong to a single authority, which is not desirable. Hence the many TLDs in existence: artificially reduce the centralization that DNS suffers at root level.
Now, this problem doesn't exist with Namecoin. The system is already decentralized, so why bother with TLDs? TLDs with Namecoin would be purely "visual", actually the authority would be the same: every single computer connected to the network. With the traditional DNS system, foo.com and foo.net are in fact attributed by totally different authorities, but .bit and (say) .bot would be handled in exactly the same way.
Ideally, even the ".bit" part shouldn't be used at all. As a matter of fact, in many namecoin-related tools we don't even use them. It's only needed when using traditional DNS tools.
So, my take: let's not use TLDs (because they don't have any meaning in an already decentralized system), continue to say ".bit" when we need to specify we're dealing with Namecoin domains, and keep that suffix off when it's not needed.
Hmmm, that's some pioneering thinking. Not sure if I followed all of it but if simplifying things to just one name, sans the .com, .bit etc would be pretty revolutionary and probably quite desirable for a lot of non technical users, search engines, lots of things come to mind actually.
Do away with TLD altogether for Namecoin? Can we test this out somehow before the infrastructure gets to heavily invested?