When Michael W. Dean first mentioned his excitement about Namecoin to me a few months ago, I appreciated his excitement, but was somewhat reluctant to look into it. I first met Michael when he put out a call on his syndicated radio show, Freedom Feens, for programmers interested in another project he was working on and we formed a good working relationship. I had looked at Namecoin briefly months earlier and it seemed kludgy and hard to use, especially as a Windows user. I think many people who follow technology are understandably numb to new developments due to the wealth and frequency at which new potentially disruptive technologies are appearing.

I attribute much of the rapid and diverse innovation that is going on to the empowerment people have found through their ability to collaborate worldwide with others who share similar goals, or fill skill gaps. The ability to form a team and to build on others’ work has been massively facilitated by the Internet, the open source software movement, and websites and systems that allow for cooperation between geographically diverse innovators.

Similar mechanisms have enabled revolutions politically, seen in the US through what is believed to have begun as the Ron Paul revolution, yet have truly been simmering in a more uncoordinated way for decades. This has happened not just in the US, but in other political upheavals worldwide.

Networks of communication are allowing people to use their skills and ambition, and capitalize on the skills of others when needed. This is the future of innovation and advancement of humanity and it is accelerating, but it’s also still at risk of being controlled by overzealous central authorities, whether they are governments or other associations, the more we rely on an Internet which is centralized, the more power is given to the few who have control over it. There are solutions for these problems and there are some brilliant solutions developing. Many of these developers are like me, just individuals working in their basements for the fun of it.

Namecoin

Namecoin is a crypto-coin based on Bitcoin, but with what is a very simple added feature; it allows anyone to create and store a name with associated data in a decentralized manner in the Namecoin blockchain, which only the owner of the name can control. Dot-Bit is a new top level domain specified by the Namecoin team. Anyone with a small amount of Namecoin can register a name (the domain, like dotbitkittypix.bit) along with the data that describes IP addresses and/or other configuration for the domain name. Namecoin has a value because this feature has utility and cost, but it is not meant to be a currency alone as Bitcoin is.

Unlike other crypto-currencies, Namecoin works in a non-competitive way with Bitcoin through a feature termed merged mining. This allows Bitcoin miners to mine for Namecoin at the same time by discovering the solutions to Namecoin blocks through the Bitcoin mining process. This increases the hash power (and thereby security) of the Namecoin network without taking away miners who would otherwise be processing blocks on the Bitcoin network.

Freeing The Internet

When I saw the release announcement for FreeSpeechMe, the Firefox browser plug-in that allows browsing of dot-bit domains, I gave it a whirl. I happened to have Firefox installed for website testing, but it’s not a web browser I usually use. After installing the plug-in, it took a while to download the blockchain so that it was usable for dot-bit browsing; but once it was working I started to become excited. I realized that people were actually using Dot-Bit. There were Dot-Bit websites out there, and Michael W. Dean and the developer, Jeremy Rand, had written a bunch of great tutorials about where to get Namecoin, how to register names, and how to configure webservers to operate with dot-bit domain names. It seemed to me at that point like this was something that might happen. It wasn’t the kludgy console interface that didn’t make any sense to me anymore. People were moving this thing forward, there was momentum.

For all the initial excitement though, some amount of disappointment soon followed. This was only usable in Firefox which is not a browser I ever use, and I really wasn’t willing to switch over to it. Also this only worked for web browsing; but the Internet is more than the web and I considered that this would be useful for protecting other services from the perils of centralization and censorship. IRC servers (an old but still used Internet Chat protocol), ftp sites, could all benefit from this, and this is how MeowBit began to be born.

MeowBit is a service that runs within Windows (XP and up) which allows system-wide resolution of .bit domains for all web browsers and other Internet apps like FTP clients and IRC. It works with the Namecoin wallet to provide a trustless resolution of the domain names from the blockchain stored on the user’s PC. This differs substantially from the way the current Domain Name System works.

In simplest terms, DNS (Domain Name System) resolves domain names to IP addresses like a telephone book resolves names to phone numbers, but it’s actually more like calling the operator to ask for the number every time you make a call. Under DNS, a system that dates back to the 80’s, domain names are resolved in a hierarchical fashion. First you ask your trusted provider such as your ISP to resolve a domain name for you. If that provider doesn’t know the answer it (or in some cases another provider that it trusts) uses a centralized registry of domain name authorities to contact the server that is responsible for resolving that particular domain name to a number. The topmost centralized authority which everyone using DNS relies on is ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), this is a corporation contracted by the US Government via the United States Department of Commerce to provide this and other authoritative services for the Internet. It's not just the US. The whole system is delegated off to other authorities from ICANN via the root servers. DNS requires unverifiable trust; the vulnerabilities of this system for some website owners are very apparent.

Namecoin’s Dot-Bit resolution is a trustless system. In decentralized systems, that is a good thing! This means that you can verify the integrity and authenticity of the data from within your own PC without relying on someone else; the Namecoin wallet does this for you. Without going into the details of how the Namecoin blockchain works (it is principally the same as Bitcoin’s), it should suffice to say that the blockchain itself, which took a lot of mathematical work to create, cannot be forged. MeowBit resolves domain names to IP addresses using information that is assuredly correct and unforgeable without trusting your ISP, ICANN or any government. Names are registered on the blockchain by making transactions with namecoins. Like Bitcoin, a Namecoin transaction does not start with permission, and cannot be prevented by anyone. This grants a website operator who owns their Dot-Bit domain to update that name at any time if they need to move their website to a different physical location with a different IP address. A publisher which is being censored could reopen their site from anywhere, and not lose the domain name to which it is attached, so they can still be found by their users.

Just Doing It

I got in touch with Michael when I began realizing the potential for a system-wide Dot-Bit resolver for Windows. I had a plan for whipping something up for Windows 8. Michael and Jeremy had been working on the FreeSpeechMe project for a few weeks and there was a lot of attention being gathered for it and Namecoin, especially in the liberty movement due to its potential for preventing website censorship.

Michael, Jeremy and I got into an email conversation about my idea. Jeremy, being a full time computer science student, was already overwhelmed with his current workload and seemed to have little interest in the project. He suggested that I post about it on the Namecoin forums to get feedback (read as consent) from other developers in the community. I was reluctant to this because I had already begun programming.  Even if no one else was interested in the result, I was sure I could do this in a pretty short time frame, and the development of this simply seemed fun.

The initial concept was only for Windows 8, which provides an easier interface for redirecting DNS name lookups to my application than was possible with previous versions of Windows. Michael was very enthusiastic about the project but determined that a way should be found to incorporate support for previous operating systems as well. My primary interest in the project, like most software projects I’ve become involved with was more than partially selfish. I wanted this software on my machine; I wanted to browse Dot-Bit websites with ease, and a useful side effect would be that others could use it too. We settled on devising a way to support as many Windows versions as possible, hoping even for an XP version, an operating system which is still in wide use.

Most of the previous Namecoin client development was targeted at Linux based systems, as that is what most of the current developers seem to use. Our concept was to bring Dot-Bit usability and adoption to the masses; and generally the masses use Windows. Namecoin has been around for three years now, but the development team is still small; more adoption should attract more developers.

Michael and I began working on MeowBit in February with Michael as promoter and advisor (and everything else that didn’t involve writing code) and I as the programmer. In order to build on Namecoin’s momentum, we spent many very late hours designing, marketing and programming so that we could release something workable fast. We were able to launch MeowBit for Windows 7 & 8 in early March, about a week after beginning the development, and we launched a version for Windows XP a couple weeks later.

This was a challenging schedule for both of us, as neither Michael nor I could devote ourselves to this full time. There was also little hope of financial compensation for our time; this happened because it was fun and we knew we were doing something useful, and we enjoyed working together.

The Namecoin Dot-Bit specification supports many neat features that are not yet implemented in MeowBit, such as the ability to use Dot-Bit domain names to access hidden web services in the Tor network, and a proposed system for providing secure https connections without the need for a central authority to issue SSL certificates. We will be continuing to adopt more of the Dot-Bit specification into MeowBit, but for most purposes it works well today.

More Than Just DNS

Under the hood, Namecoin simply stores a name and a value. This names and values are limited only by length, they can mean anything. Dot-Bit is currently implemented using a specification proposed by the Namecoin dev team. In one of its simplest forms, the data for a domain such as feens.bit might look like this:

d/feens: {"ip": ["192.168.1.1", "192.168.7.1"]}

This specifies that the name ‘feens’ in the ‘d/’ namespace (that by the specification corresponds to a .bit domain) has two IP addresses. Another value example shows how torexample.bit might be mapped to a Tor address:

d/torexample: {"tor": "eqt5g4fuenphqinx.onion"}

A person with the Namecoin wallet software can look up the values for any names using the built in console Debug Window and the name_show command:

Dot-Bit is what Namecoin is most known for so far, but it’s really only part of what Namecoin can be. Names must be unique, but in the above examples the leading namespace designation d/ (which is only a convention) is considered the namespace. The name d/feens is registered, but u/feens, l/ feens etc could also be registered. Anyone can define a new namespace and a specification for it, and no one is bound to use anyone else’s specification. The ability to store any type of data in the space without restriction will allow Namecoin to be used for things that haven’t even been thought of yet.

Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants

While developing MeowBit, it came to mind that it would be nice to be able to notify users of new versions of the software. I had considered setting up a web service for this allowing the application to check the MeowBit.com (or .bit) website to see if a new version was available, that is to create a centralized authority for determining the latest version of the software. Creating a specialized web service just for doing this is the way I and others have often solved this problem; but I had in my hands the Namecoin blockchain where I can store any data I want, and which will always be accessible to all users even when the MeowBit.com website is down. I quickly whipped up a draft of a specification for a new namespace that would be able to store the version information for MeowBit, and registered a new name: p/meowbit (the p is for product), I tried to make it somewhat generic in the hopes that other people will use this specification too. The data looks like this:

{
      "name" : "MeowBit dot-bit resolution for Windows",
      "url" : ["http://meowbit.com/download-and-install/",
            "http://meowbit.com",
            "http://meowbit.bit",
            "https://github.com/Derrick-/MeowBit"],
      "signer" : "MxYgCsHV7Nx4zMLQjHwRY7XzenU8AVAbuw",
      "producer" : "id/beastlick",
      "author" : "id/derrick",
      "version" : "0.5.5204.40235",
      "dist" : [{
                  "os" : "w",
                  "type" : "i",
                  "file" : "MeowBitSetup_05.exe",
                  "hash" : {
                        "md5" : "b007a0b396140f8345ee89dc990c56d2"
                  }
            }, {
                  "os" : "w",
                  "type" : "b",
                  "file" : "MeowBit.exe",
                  "hash" : {
                        "md5" : "c146a7836789101f54592059acdd83be"
                  }
            }
      ]
}

This gives everyone all kinds of great information about the software. It has the latest version number, an MD5 hash of the installer and main executable, where to get it, who made it, etc. It’s all stored in the blockchain, if the MeowBit website disappears or is down, anyone with a copy of the software (from whatever source) can verify that it’s genuine, and it can only be updated by me (or someone else that I could transfer the name to).

There are already a few other established non-DNS uses for the Namecoin system:

·    NameID: https://nameid.org/

o  Uses the id/ namespace. Register your identity information on the Blockchain and even use it as an OpenID for logging onto secure websites.

·    OneName: https://www.onename.io/

o  Uses the u/ namespace. Receive Bitcoin With Just Your Username

·    Bit.co.in shortening service: https://bit.co.in/

o  Uses the bit.co.in/ namespace. Decentralized & Fraud Proof Address Shortener

Namecoin To The Moon

I envision Namecoin as a potential replacement for any public ledger system, or even a semi-private ledger if the value data is encrypted. For me, the elegance of Namecoin is in its simplicity. In addition to the Dot-Bit specification and other current implementations, I think there must be countless unforeseeable uses to Namecoin, including replacing every single "service" that governments claim to need a monopoly on for our own good.

Links:

http://meowbit.com

http://freedomfeens.com

http://namecoin.info

http://hackmaine.org

Article References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System#History

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICANN

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Assigned_Numbers_Authority

https://wiki.namecoin.info/index.php?title=Domain_Name_Specification

https://nameid.org/

https://www.onename.io/

https://bit.co.in/

Derrick Slopey is a full time software engineer, husband, father of two, and liberty enthusiast from the woods of Maine. Derrick also developed the Silver Calculator App for Windows Phone in 2013 and often provides technical consulting for the liberty movement and cheerleading for disruptive technologies. He is also an organizer of the Maine Hacker Club, a loosely affiliated group of technology enthusiasts in central Maine. Derrick can be contacted via email at derrick@alienseed.com