NMC price and domain hoarding

[indolering]

Someone sent me a PM with the following question:

Do you believe that growing popularity will push up value of NMC & renewal costs thus making it unaffordable to hoard loads of names.

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.

• 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.

Hardforks for every price change is simply not sustainable, however there is resistance to any outside data being used to determine price. I believe this has a lot to do with the predilections of people who enjoy working on decentralized systems and that Jeremy's proposal (which optionally uses outside data to inform votes) can be made to satisfy all parties.

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.

[signup292]

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[mightbemike]

What I was trying to ask (yes, it was me) was about the scenario where
A. price goes up to $10 USD per namecoin (or something higher than current)
B. renewal cost is implemented

The theory is that *most* people would feel a disincentive to stop hoarding large numbers of domains, as the carrying cost would be harder to tolerate.

If renewals cost 10 namecents, that's just about free for a kid who wants a .bit domain name. But for the speculator who wants to carry 1000 names it cost 100 namecoins. If NMC was at $10, the kid pays one dollar for his name, the speculator pays $1000.

No reason to give this renewal fee to miners either. They are incentivized by the $10 price of the coin. At least for some years until the block rewards go away. If this money goes to fund the core dev team it's a great scheme. Need to send it to a multisig address tho, so the brand new guy on core dev can't sweep the namecoins to another address without others involved.

[tosh0]

um i agree with mightbemike, in a year time, the price should stabilize around 10$ just as now is stabilizing around 1 eur. (but it all depends on what btc is doing)
Also there must be a renewal fee and it should be the same or lower than the registrar fee. This fee could go to development of the system. (Namecoin foundation?) Also i'm more inclined to alow multiyear renewal, than to have different fee schedules for different namespaces. this can help with the problem of id/ expiring.

[kurt]

ok So you want to monetize .bit to fund development and further the Namecoin Project

but dont want to encourage squatting or name hording.

What would happen to onename ? or anyone else who wanted to fork namecoin and create d/namespace of u/namespace
or z/namespace

would they have to pay the increased renewal fee's ?

[biolizard89]

For the record, none of the core developers (to my knowledge) want name fees to go to the developers. (I'm certainly against that.)

If we increased name fees, I think it would probably need to be uniform for all namespaces; otherwise it's just too easy to abuse. (Maybe a median consensus could effectively counter abuse... but I'm not sure of that.) For namespaces that don't need human-choosable names (e.g. dd/), there are ways to prevent them from accruing name fees, without making it namespace-specific... Ryan and I were discussing this a while back but there's no formal proposal yet.

[sudoquai]

Someone sent me a PM with the following question:

Do you believe that growing popularity will push up value of NMC & renewal costs thus making it unaffordable to hoard loads of names.

... 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.

Yes, renewal costs will help.

I think you mean $13 million according to http://coinmarketcap.com/ ...

Edit: under $10 million dollar according to http://coinmarketcap.com - Namecoin and the current development style is loosing confidence at the moment.

Instead of waiting for funding, you should act more offensive:

1) Define a roadmap and put it on the website, so that it would be clear for investors, what they are paying for (Gant Diagramm, costs, ressources, tasks and subtasks, TIME ESTIMATED, etc.). It would help new interested developers, or general, team members to see the open tasks on the first sight and helps yourself to see where the journey is going. (Estimated time: 1 weekend)

2) Put finally a Adsense banner on the top to cover hosting costs. (Estimated time: 3-4 hours)

3) Use a funding service like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and give them the roadmap and define attractive targets. (Estimated time: 1 weekend)

4) Buy Namecoin and implement interesting and easy (?) to implement ideas, like "Name Trading", which would help together with renewal fees to get rid off the squatter "problem" (another word for squatter could be domain trader). What is working in the ICANN Internet (Sedo) should most probably work for Namecoin .Bit Domains.
Don't you think so? https://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.p ... me+trading (Estimated time: 2-3 months ?)

5) Take the registration fees of names and share them between the development team. I've seen some people think this is not a good idea ? Why - it helps you to get the funds you need. A possible distribution modell would be to implement a Namecoin "Like" feature for .bit domains, /id names whatever and just let the system decide to which parts (likes) the donation will go. If your work (or just somebodys nose) is something worth you can be sure to get a lot of donations this way (with the like/voting system) and this would be another game changer for Namecoin as an attractive feature. (Estimated time: 2-3 months ?)

It's only a suggestion - you don't have to follow or discuss it. You can use them for free if you like, it's on your own (sorry if this sounds rude, but my intention is to underline some parts)

Best Regards, Sudo.

[biolizard89]

Someone sent me a PM with the following question:

Do you believe that growing popularity will push up value of NMC & renewal costs thus making it unaffordable to hoard loads of names.

... 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.

Yes, renewal costs will help.

I think you mean $13 million according to http://coinmarketcap.com/ ...

Instead of waiting for funding, you should act more offensive:

1) Define a roadmap and put it on the website, so that it would be clear for investors, what they are paying for (Gant Diagramm, costs, ressources, tasks and subtasks, TIME ESTIMATED, etc.). It would help new interested developers, or general, team members to see the open tasks on the first sight and helps yourself to see where the journey is going. (Estimated time: 1 weekend)

I did a first stab at this for the FreeSpeechMe fundraiser. A more thorough job would certainly be helpful.

2) Put finally a Adsense banner on the top to cover hosting costs. (Estimated time: 3-4 hours)

Ads have been discussed. Adsense will not happen.

3) Use a funding service like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and give them the roadmap and define attractive targets. (Estimated time: 1 weekend)

I'd personally lean toward BountySource for a fundraiser. I'd also suggest doing fundraisers annually. Anyone else have comments?

4) Buy Namecoin and implement interesting and easy (?) to implement ideas, like "Name Trading", which would help together with renewal fees to get rid off the squatter "problem" (another word for squatter could be domain trader). What is working in the ICANN Internet (Sedo) should most probably work for Namecoin .Bit Domains.
Don't you think so? https://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.p ... me+trading (Estimated time: 2-3 months ?)

Atomic name trading would be excellent. I think Bitmessage would be a good method of peer discovery for this... anyone want to work on it?

5) Take the registration fees of names and share them between the development team. I've seen some people think this is not a good idea ? Why - it helps you to get the funds you need.

It would give the appearance that the developers have a profit motive rather than a free speech motive. No one trusts coins that have a premine, this is the same concept. I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect this might also cause legal issues if someone were to use Namecoin for something illegal (since we would be profiting off of illegal activity).

A possible distribution modell would be to implement a Namecoin "Like" feature for .bit domains, /id names whatever and just let the system decide to which parts (likes) the donation will go. If your work (or just somebodys nose) is something worth you can be sure to get a lot of donations this way (with the like/voting system) and this would be another game changer for Namecoin as an attractive feature. (Estimated time: 2-3 months ?)

I'm not sure I understand your request. Do you mean having a way to send NMC to a Namecoin name? That already exists, it's called sendtoname. Are you asking to have this be exposed in a web browser UI?

It's only a suggestion - you don't have to follow or discuss it. You can use them for free if you like, it's on your own (sorry if this sounds rude, but my intention is to underline some parts)

Suggestions are how progress happens.

[tosh0]

actually the bigger the fees the lower the $ value. Sadly nmc squaters don't have any incentive to buy nmc or help the project , as the higher the nmc value the higher the fees they pay to register names.

I think the fees should not be raised; let it rise naturally when nmc price rise. For this a campaign targeting domain registrars as well as other investors should be in order, as the rise will help build the ecosystem as regular registrars buy NMC and offer .bit domains. they will have an incentive to fund or contribute to development. After that the ecosystem should start to grow, just like btc.

TL,DR: we are slow 2012 btc mode "gather some cheap coins and hold a few years",
i would target 0.2 to 0.5$ per name but not raising fees.

[signup292]

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