[lug] Anyone interested in .bit domain names?

[Davide Del Vento]

Hi Sean,

there are several things I don't understand.

>> Interesting. Two questions I didn't find answered in the wiki:
>> 1) Does Google crawl them?
>
> If you publish them as example.namecoin.us, definitely.

Isn't that just a second "ordinary" name? Like having example.org the
same as example.com?

> If they become
> popular enough, I would assume that google will set up the ability to
> resolve them,

Sure, but I was asking about the "right now"

> but at the moment it doesn't look like Google Public DNS will
> resolve them directly:

Well, this is a different question, and it opens a different can of
worms. I understand how DNS works (and don't like it very much, mainly
because if I use somebody's DNS, then I'm completely in their hands).
How that would change with bit domains where there isn't any
authoritative name server? How can uniqueness be enforced (if it is?
if not, how can it work without?)

> I'm giving away namecoins because I want to help promote them so that
> perhaps they will reach the tipping point in popularity.

I understand. What I don't understand is a high level philosophy of
the why (first) and how (later) without going into the dirty technical
details. I mean, a "domain without a central registration authority"
seems cool, but why is it a desirable goal? Wouldn't open more
problems such as companies registering each other trademarks without
possibility of appeal? What if we both register SeanReifschneider.bit
at the same time, before the information is propagated through the
whole peer-to-peer network? I couldn't find such a discussion in that
wiki (or in wikipedia, FWIW).

I only vaguely understand how bitcoins work, and maybe you are taking
that for granted. Probably the point is that for my (limited) mind,
money is just a more convenient way to do a barter: I shovel your
sidewalk, you give me a cup of soup.... so there are several things I
don't grasp (such as the "printing money" ability that everybody is
given under the bitcoin model).

>> 2) once you have the namecoind in background, can you use them as any
>> other domain (e.g. ssh'ing, browsing, etc)?
>
> namecoind has nothing to do with that, you need to set up something like
> dnsmasq or a DNS server which will resolve them, point your resolv.conf at
> something that will resolve them, etc...

Ok, so what namecoind supposed to do? I couldn't find any explanation
either (maybe I'm just having a bad-web-search day :-)

Thanks for the conversation,
Davide