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 provide a response 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 previous chapters.

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 validation mechanism, driven by blockchain-based distributed and decentralized consensus.

It is based on the same technology introduced with bitcoin, but with its own blockchain and wallet software. The source code for the Namecoin core is available...