[tor-dev] Tor and Namecoin

[Jeremy Rand]

Yaron Goland:
> I'm also a noob, so just to be clear, is the goal here to adopt namecoin as a naming mechanism for hidden services or is the goal to enable a generic extension mechanism where multiple different naming solutions can be experimented with and namecoin wants to build the code to leverage that mechanism so it can be part of the more general naming experiment?
> 
> 	Thanks,
> 
> 		Yaron

Hi Yaron,

My personal take on this is that modularity and reusability are good
design principles to aim for.  As such, I think it would be good for any
solution to allow multiple naming systems (not just Namecoin) to be used
with Tor, and similarly, multiple hidden-service-like systems (e.g. Tor,
I2P, Freenet, ZeroNet, IPFS, and MaidSafe) would ideally be usable with
Namecoin (and whatever other naming systems might be used).  Of course,
this might be difficult to achive in a completely general case, but the
amount of added code needed to add a new naming system or new
hidden-service-like system would ideally be as small as possible.

For this reason, I think using or-ctl-filter would have an advantage
here, since it also can be used with I2P, whereas Nick's suggestion of
using the Tor controller API appears to be fairly specialized to Tor.

All that said -- my opinion is that Namecoin does offer a combination of
properties that aren't really offered by any other systems, and that
that particular combination is very useful for Tor hidden services
(particularly given that the length of .onion names is going to be made
a lot longer).  So I would love to see Namecoin be adopted by Tor.  I do
understand, though, that this would mean a lot of review that hasn't
happened yet.  I'd be happy to work with Tor to facilitate that, if
there's interest.  And, of course, it's likely that my opinion of
Namecoin isn't exactly impartial, seeing as I'm one of the Namecoin
developers.  I do think that enabling people to more easily experiment
with combining Namecoin and Tor hidden services seems to be a prudent
step to take before any kind of adoption of Namecoin by Tor.

Hope this answers your inquiry -- let me know if I was unclear about
anything.

Cheers,
-Jeremy

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