Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition

Namecoin

Namecoin is the first fork of the Bitcoin source code. The key idea behind Namecoin is not to produce an altcoin but instead to provide improved decentralization, censorship resistance, privacy, security, and faster-decentralized naming. Decentralized naming services are intended to respond to inherent limitations such as slowness and centralized control in the traditional Domain Name System (DNS) protocols used on the internet. Namecoin is also the first solution to Zooko's triangle, which was briefly discussed in Chapter 1, Blockchain 101.

Namecoin is used to essentially provide a service to register a key/value pair. One major use case of Namecoin is that it can provide a decentralized Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate ...