Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: [BIP 15] Aliases

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:48:33 -0500

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 12:36 PM, Khalahan <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Namecoin is a peer-to-peer generic name/value datastore system.
> Don't forget it's not limited to .bit usage ! So, directly mapping
> things to .bit url would not be the optimal way of using namecoin.
>
> Namecoin is specificaly designed to map things to names in a fully
> decentralized way. So, it's the perfect starting point to map names to
> other things (a public bitcoin address, an url, etc)
> You won't have all the advantages of namecoin when using other systems
> like DNS and HTTP(S) as the first entry point.

How can one construct a zero-trust (or nearly zero trust) namecoin
resolver without having a copy of the ever growing complete namecoin
block chain?

The bitcoin lite node mechanism will not work because a peer could
return stale records or no-result and you would have no evidence of
their deception.  (In the case of lite bitcoin nodes, telling you
about old transactions is harmless because you control your own
transactions).