Namecoin

https://namecoin.sourceforge.io

What is Namecoin?

Namecoin is a decentralized open source information registration and transfer system based on the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.

What does it do?

• Securely record and transfer arbitrary names (keys).
• Attach a value (data) to the names (up to 520 bytes).
• Transact namecoins, the digital currency (ℕ, NMC).

Namecoin was the first fork of Bitcoin and still is one of the most innovative altcoins. It was first to implement merged mining and a decentralized DNS.

What can it be used for?

• Protecting human rights online by making the web more resistant to censorship.
• Access websites using the .bit domain.
• Store identity information such as email, GPG key, BTC address, TLS fingerprints, Bitmessage address, etc.

For more information, as well as an immediately useable, binary version of
the Namecoin software, see https://sourceforge.net/projects/namecoin/files/.

License

Copyright © 2022 The Namecoin Developers

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. See COPYING for more
information or see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Development Process

The contribution workflow is described in CONTRIBUTING.md
and useful hints for developers can be found in doc/developer-notes.md.

The Namecoin developer forum or the
mailing list should be used
to discuss complicated or controversial changes before working on a patch set.

Testing

Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull
requests than we can review and test on short notice. Please be patient and help out by testing
other people's pull requests, and remember this is a security-critical project where any mistake might cost people
lots of money.

Automated Testing

Developers are strongly encouraged to write unit tests for new code, and to
submit new unit tests for old code. Unit tests can be compiled and run
(assuming they weren't disabled in configure) with: make check. Further details on running
and extending unit tests can be found in /src/test/README.md.

There are also regression and integration tests, written
in Python.
These tests can be run (if the test dependencies are installed) with: test/functional/test_runner.py

Manual Quality Assurance (QA) Testing

Changes should be tested by somebody other than the developer who wrote the
code. This is especially important for large or high-risk changes. It is useful
to add a test plan to the pull request description if testing the changes is
not straightforward.

Translations

Translation workflow is not yet set up for Namecoin. For strings which are common to Bitcoin Core, see below.

Changes to translations as well as new translations can be submitted to
Bitcoin Core's Transifex page.

Translations are periodically pulled from Transifex and merged into the git repository. See the
translation process for details on how this works.