Addressing the squatting problem

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misterbigg
Posts: 14
Joined: Wed Jun 29, 2011 6:55 am
os: windows

Addressing the squatting problem

Post by misterbigg »

Squatting is largely a problem of search engines which link to the squatted domains.

One solution, is to allow namecoin domain renewals to include an extra payment. The payment would go to the miner who solves the block.

Search engines could use the additional payment information to prioritize the domain in results.

For example, if I own microsoft.bit, I might spend 10 or 20 extra namecoins per registration period to jack up my relevance in the search results.

This has the effect of making the useful domains more expensive, but also makes it more expensive for squatted domains to be valuable (since it is prohibitively expensive to make extra payments for a large number of squatted domains per renewal period).

Combined with some of the ideas in my other proposal:

http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=204

This could be useful.

Since the squatted domains are not associated with extra payments, they would be very far down in the list of search results provided by engines. Typosquatting is a different story though.

khal
Site Admin
Posts: 708
Joined: Mon May 09, 2011 5:09 pm
os: linux

Re: Addressing the squatting problem

Post by khal »

misterbigg wrote:Search engines could use the additional payment information to prioritize the domain in results.
Search engines should not discriminate on wealth.

There are some protection on bitcoin/namecoin against tx spam without fees (miner fees) / with fees, according to the transaction priority (complex value based on coin age and tx amount).

Imagine you pay 0.01NMC for a name_new, from a "block" of 50NMC, you get back 49.99NMC which are now "fresh" (that's how bitcoin/namecoin works).
If you want to spend money (normal tx or name operation) from this 49.99 "block", you may pay some fees due to the fact that you just receive them.

Fees are curently of 0.01NMC, but if we follow the bitcoin releases (vince is currently merging a recent bitcoin to namecoin), it'll change to 0.0005NMC, so the effect would be less important.
But, we can increase the effect of this, or change it for the name_* operations, or anything else.

There is also a fee of 0.01NMC for each 1k bytes of the tx size. We could also adjust this, for all tx or only name_* tx.

The network will allow a certain number of tx without fees, and delay the others. We can also change this.

But remember than changing those settings must be carefully "studied".
NamecoinID: id/khal
GPG : 9CC5B92E965D69A9
NMC: N1KHAL5C1CRzy58NdJwp1tbLze3XrkFxx9
BTC: 1KHAL8bUjnkMRMg9yd2dNrYnJgZGH8Nj6T

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misterbigg
Posts: 14
Joined: Wed Jun 29, 2011 6:55 am
os: windows

Re: Addressing the squatting problem

Post by misterbigg »

khal wrote:
misterbigg wrote:Search engines could use the additional payment information to prioritize the domain in results.
Search engines should not discriminate on wealth.
Bulk registration of domains only works because search engines don't discriminate. Since a central authority for determining which names are the "good" ones is a laughably bad idea, allowing the owner of a domain to boost its value by spending extra coins on it every renewal period is a way of announcing to the world that the domain is more legitimate.

The reason being, it is more practical to own a couple of domains and boost their apparent value through extra spending, than it is to do the same thing with tens of thousands of squatted domains (impossible really).

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