Bitcoin History Part 5: A Wild Altcoin Appears

[PRIBO247]

It’s hard to imagine a time before cryptocurrency
exchanges were stocked with hundreds of digital assets.
A time before the pejorative “shitcoin” had been coined
and there was no such metric as bitcoin dominance. But
travel back to late 2010 and that’s exactly what you’d
have found: a cryptosphere in which BTC was the only
coin in town. But all that was about to change.

Namecoin Is First Out the Blocks
The first altcoin to emerge following bitcoin wasn’t
litecoin, peercoin or dash. Rather, it was a now obscure
cryptocurrency called namecoin (NMC). It was unveiled
on the Bitcointalk forum on April 18, 2011, with a
mandate that read quite differently from that of BTC.
Compared to the many identikit alts that sprung up in the
months to follow, NMC began life with novel intentions.
“Namecoin is a naming system based on bitcoin with a
few modifications,” explained its [announce] thread,
utilizing a formula that is today known as an [ANN]. “This
is a new blockchain, separate from the main Bitcoin
chain. Name/value pairs are stored in the blockchain
attached to coin … Names expire after 12000 blocks
unless renewed with an update.”

Curiously, but perhaps not surprisingly, the inspiration for
Namecoin came from Satoshi himself, though he had no
hand in its development. Four months earlier, Bitcoin’s
creator had essentially conceived the idea of Namecoin,
writing , in a thread titled “BitDNS and Generalizing
Bitcoin,” “While you are generating bitcoins, why not also
get free domain names for the same work? If you
currently generate 50 BTC per week, now you could get
50 BTC and some domain names too.” Satoshi went on
to explain a technical proposal involving merkle trees
that would eventually form the basis for Namecoin.

Moreover, Namecoin’s goal of serving as a decentralized
domain registration system may have been partially
inspired by Satoshi’s own experience of purchasing the
bitcoin.org domain in 2008. With no anonymous
cryptocurrency with which to pay, he was forced to use
anonymouspeech.com, which enables services to be
acquired using gift cards.

What’s in a Namecoin?
Today, namecoin is effectively a dead coin, despite still
being listed on Poloniex and Livecoin. In its seven-year
history, NMC has had its moments of glory, like the time
it pumped to $15.41 per coin or 0.014 BTC in Nov. 2013.
Or the time it hit $8.64 in January of this year, one final
burst of nostalgia at a time when every shitcoin under
the sun was pumping. By then, namecoin was already a
dead coin, with its bitcoin value reaching just 0.0006 BTC
per coin. Today, its 24-hour trade volume stands at
$15,000 and Namecoin’s DNS naming system is dead in
the water. That’s not to say NMC has been an outright
failure, however.

With over 2,000 cryptocurrencies now vying for
supremacy, Namecoin can be credited with either starting
the stampede or instigating the rot. Whatever one’s
assessment of Namecoin and the plethora of altcoins
that followed, NMC was pivotal in demonstrating that
there is space in the cryptosphere for more than just one
digital asset. Today there are multiple bitcoins and a
panoply of shitcoins, but at a 97 percent reduction from
its all-time high, Namecoin embodies the fate of all
altcoins to date. As the history books show, Bitcoin is
easily emulated but never bettered.

https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-history-part-5-a-wild-altcoin-appears/