As you explore deeper into the vintage NFT rabbit hole, you ultimately stumble upon some of the earliest examples of non-fungible assets (.bit Domains, Punycodes, Namecoin Identities). You are mind-blown, and you can’t believe these assets were created as late as April 21, 2011. But the most significant question remains, is the Namecoin blockchain secure? Is it at risk of a 51% attack? Continue reading, and you will soon find out!
It all started on November 15th, 2010, when a Bitcointalk thread was created named “BitDNS and Generalizing Bitcoin”. In this discussion, some of the most well-known cryptocurrency evangelists such as Satoshi Nakamoto, Hal Finney, and Gavin Andresen all contributed heavily to the conversation and very much supported the idea of BitDNS.
These dialogues generated a plethora of ideas that inspired Vincent Durham to create a multipurpose and distributed naming system based on Bitcoin, which was later called Namecoin. The blockchain was initially launched on April 17, 2011, and was the first fork of Bitcoin and the first altcoin in existence. Ultimately, it was the second example of a decentralized blockchain that was entirely Proof-of-Work (PoW).
During the “BitDNS and Generalizing Bitcoin” thread, Satoshi Nakamoto expressed the first idea of sharing Bitcoin’s hashrate to secure several networks simultaneously. This example shows that Satoshi had already foreseen the possibility of this type of work and opened the door of curiosity for its construction.
Subsequently, merge mining was introduced at block 19,200 on the Namecoin blockchain (Oct. 2011). For the first time, an alternative blockchain was simultaneously secured while using Bitcoin’s Hashrate.
Surprisingly, as of November 2th, 2022, the Namecoin blockchain is currently the 2nd most secured merge mining PoW blockchain with over 151 EH/s. This is approximately 65% of the total hashrate of Bitcoin!
In summary, it is quite fascinating that a blockchain that has such a relatively small Marketcap of $17M can be considered one of the most secure blockchains to date. At the end of the day, if you think about it, the security of Namecoin is more dependent on the price of Bitcoin than the actual price of its own token (NMC).
In this article, my objective was to detach any negative stereotypes you may have had regarding the security of the Namecoin blockchain. Having said that, I hope it has brought you an increasing amount of confidence to delve deeper into these digital relics. Thank you for reading! :)
Written by: @nick.bit