I am guessing that we will be able to push up domain costs and introduce renewals in a year or so. There are several complications with increasing the price of domain names.Do you believe that growing popularity will push up value of NMC & renewal costs thus making it unaffordable to hoard loads of names.
- Prices are currently hardcoded and changing it requires a soft/hard fork (I can't remember offhand). However, it is tricky to implement price discovery.
- The ideal price point for /d is different than for /id and many other uses.
- Until .bit domains are usable for the general public higher prices mainly impact developers.
I agree that /id and others should have different pricing and renewal schemes but I have yet to submit a proposal on how to determine that price.
For immediate future, Domob and others have convinced me that the currently low prices are a net positive. Until Namecoin is usable for the average person (multisig/zk registrars, instant start-up lightweight clients that start with SPV and transition to UTXO, nameserver support for JSDNS/frame resolution/Speech.is) the price reflects the low utility of a .bit address and makes it easier for developers to get involved.
However, I am committed to eventually introducing renewals fees and increasing the /d namespace price above $5. Anyone who thinks that this is a bad thing doesn't understand Zooko's Triangle nor the value of naming systems.
Ultimately, the reason we haven't implemented these these proposals is that they require modeling before we will feel comfortable altering a system that is worth some $20 million dollars. This is very difficult work and we haven't had much luck finding funding. I could publish 2-4 papers/year on Namecoin but myself and everyone on the team is having to squeeze fundamental research into our free time. We need sustainable funding.