Namecoin .bit domains

Information

Created: 21 April 2011
Creator: Vincent Durham
Blockchain: Namecoin

Namecoin and the Birth of .bit Domains

What if you could own an Internet name without asking a registrar for permission? In 2010, that was not an obvious question to ask. Bitcoin had been running for little more than a year, and most of the discussion around it concerned money. Then people started wondering whether the same machinery could be used for something else. Perhaps a domain name.

The idea led first to BitDNS and then to Namecoin, a separate blockchain that recorded Internet names and the information associated with them. Looking back from the world of NFTs, the result is familiar in an unexpected way: a unique digital object, controlled by cryptographic keys, recorded on a blockchain and capable of being transferred.

It was not an NFT. Nobody was calling it one. The term had not yet become part of everyday blockchain vocabulary. But some of the ideas that would later become associated with NFTs were already being tested.

Before Namecoin, there was BitDNS

In November 2010, a discussion appeared on the Bitcoin forum under the title BitDNS and Generalizing Bitcoin. The proposal was straightforward: create a system that could allocate and transfer Internet names without relying on a central authority.

The existing Domain Name System worked through a hierarchy of organisations and registrars. It was practical, but it required trust. Someone had to maintain the records and ultimately determine which names existed.

BitDNS asked whether Bitcoin's technology could be used to do the job instead. The discussion attracted people working on Bitcoin, including Gavin Andresen and Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi suggested that a domain system could run on its own blockchain while sharing mining power with Bitcoin. Bitcoin would not need to become a giant database of domain names; a separate network could handle that job and use Bitcoin's proof-of-work security.

There were plenty of practical problems to solve. How would somebody register a name? How could the system stop another person from seeing a desired name on the network and registering it first? How would the network be paid for? What happened when somebody stopped renewing a domain?

These were the sorts of details that tend to make simple ideas complicated. One participant pointed out a particularly awkward possibility. If miners were responsible for creating names, someone wanting gavin.bitdns might have to sit around mining and hope they happened to find a block. That was not going to be very convenient.

Enter Namecoin

On 18 April 2011, a developer using the name Vinced announced Namecoin. The developer is generally identified with Vincent Durham, although the historical record is tied to the pseudonym rather than a conventional public biography.

Namecoin was described as a distributed naming system based on Bitcoin. It was a separate blockchain, not a modification of Bitcoin itself. Instead of using the blockchain only to record coins moving between addresses, Namecoin could also store name/value pairs.

That was the basic trick. A name could look like this: d/bitcoin. The d/ indicated the DNS namespace. The human-readable version would be bitcoin.bit. The blockchain could then store information associated with that name, such as the details needed to find the corresponding website.

It is easier to understand if you forget the word “blockchain” for a moment. Imagine a public ledger with entries saying: This particular name is controlled by this key, and this is the information currently attached to it. That was essentially what Namecoin was doing.

Bitcoin, but for names

Bitcoin answers a fairly specific question: who controls these coins? Namecoin added another one: who controls this name, and what information belongs to it?

That changed what could be represented on the blockchain. A Namecoin record was not simply a payment. It identified a particular name and could carry data associated with it. Control of the name was tied to cryptographic keys, while the blockchain provided the public record. For a domain, this meant that the Namecoin blockchain itself could act as the record of ownership rather than a conventional registrar.

There was also a practical limit on duplication. Once d/example had been registered, somebody else could not simply create another identical name and expect the network to accept both. That gave a Namecoin name some characteristics that would later become familiar in the NFT world: uniqueness, ownership, transferability and associated data. But calling a Namecoin name an NFT would blur an important distinction. Namecoin names were native blockchain records. They were not tokens created through an Ethereum smart contract or a standard such as ERC-721. The connection is conceptual and historical, not technical.

The first names

The early Namecoin blockchain was a small experiment in public view. One of the names registered almost immediately was d/bitcoin. It was successfully registered on 21 April 2011, at block 200, and its early record pointed to webpagedeveloper.me/namecoin. Later records show that the name was updated several times, giving us a glimpse of how these early blockchain names were being used.

There is something slightly odd about looking at that record now. The word bitcoin sounds enormous because we know what Bitcoin became. In April 2011, putting the name into an experimental blockchain domain was simply a way of testing the system. History has a habit of making ordinary experiments look prophetic.

Keeping somebody else from taking your name

Name registration created a problem that does not arise when you simply send someone coins. Suppose you announce that you want to register d/mygreatidea. Everyone watching the blockchain can see what you are trying to do. Someone else could see the name and try to register it first.

Namecoin dealt with this using a two-stage process. First came a registration containing a cryptographic commitment to the name. Only later was the actual name revealed and the registration completed. The protocol required a delay between the two stages. In plain English, you could say, “I have chosen a name, but I'm not telling you which one yet.” The blockchain could later verify that you had committed to that particular name. It is a good example of the kind of problem that appears once you try to make a decentralised system work in public, where everyone can see what everyone else is doing.

The blockchain becomes a registry

Once Namecoin could store names and information, the idea was extended beyond websites. The system included different namespaces. The d/ namespace was intended for domain names. Another, id/, was designed for identities. An identity could have information attached to it, including cryptographic keys and contact information. The same basic mechanism was being used for something other than domain names: give something a human-readable name and let the blockchain maintain the associated record. That made Namecoin more than a decentralised domain system. It was becoming a general-purpose blockchain registry.

Making .bit actually work

There was, however, a practical problem. The ordinary Internet did not know what to do with .bit. Typing a .bit address into a normal browser did not make the browser consult the Namecoin blockchain. Additional software and DNS infrastructure were needed to translate Namecoin's records into something conventional Internet applications could use.

Developers began building that infrastructure soon after Namecoin appeared. Over time, tools such as ncdns provided a way to make Namecoin's records available through DNS-compatible software. Creating a decentralised naming system was one problem. Getting an ordinary computer to use it was another.

Names could expire

Namecoin also had something in common with the old-fashioned domain system: names had to be renewed. Under the current Namecoin rules, a name becomes semi-expired after 31,968 blocks, roughly 222 days, if it has not been renewed or updated. At that point it stops resolving, but the owner still has a chance to recover it. After another 4,032 blocks, roughly 28 days, the name expires completely and can be registered by someone else. The whole period is therefore about 250 days.

The rules have changed during Namecoin's history, so historical records need to be considered in the context of the rules in force at the time. The basic problem remains familiar, though: a blockchain can prove that you control something without making sure you remember to keep it.

Namecoin and Bitcoin

Namecoin began as a Bitcoin fork, but it became its own blockchain. In October 2011 it introduced merged mining. This allowed miners to work on Bitcoin and Namecoin at the same time, using essentially the same proof-of-work effort. Namecoin activated merged mining at block 19,200 on 11 October 2011. For Namecoin, this meant that it did not have to build an entirely separate mining economy to secure the network. Bitcoin miners could secure both networks with the same work.

Where Namecoin fits in NFT history

The modern NFT is usually associated with Ethereum, smart contracts, token standards, wallets and marketplaces. Namecoin had none of that. It did have something else: a blockchain-native object that was not interchangeable with every other object of the same kind. A name such as d/bitcoin was unique. The blockchain recorded its history. Control depended on cryptographic keys. Information could be attached to it. The name could be transferred, while the network's rules determined whether someone else could register the same name. Those properties make early Namecoin names relevant to the history of blockchain-based digital ownership.

That does not mean Namecoin was secretly an NFT project. It was not. Its developers were trying to build a decentralised naming system. The connection to NFTs becomes clearer only later, when other blockchain projects began using similar ideas to represent digital objects. Some historians and collectors therefore describe names such as d/bitcoin as early non-fungible blockchain assets. Others use a narrower definition of NFT and reserve the term for later token systems. Both views reflect a genuine difference in terminology. The technology itself is easier to describe: in 2011, Namecoin was testing whether a blockchain could keep track of scarce, transferable digital names without a central authority. That experiment began several years before Ethereum, ENS and the modern NFT ecosystem.

Key dates

• 2009: Bitcoin launches.
• November 2010: The BitDNS discussion explores using Bitcoin-like technology for decentralised domain names.
• 18 April 2011: Namecoin is announced as a distributed naming system based on Bitcoin.
• 21 April 2011: d/bitcoin is successfully registered at Namecoin block 200.
• 2011: Early software and services begin making .bit names usable outside the Namecoin blockchain itself.
• 11 October 2011: Namecoin activates merged mining at block 19,200, allowing Bitcoin and Namecoin to be mined together.
• 2015: Ethereum launches.

2017: Development of the Ethereum Name Service begins, bringing blockchain-based naming to a much larger Ethereum ecosystem.