namecoin-core VS wot1

See namecoin, one of the very first Bitcoin forks.

https://www.namecoin.org/

Namecoin - A cryptocurrency that also acts as a decentralized DNS, which makes internet censorship much more difficult.

Bro, literally, https://www.namecoin.org was created because Bitcoiners didn't want it on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is money, other coins are structures that work better as OTHER types of protocols. Not everything is a scam. Bitcoin is the decentralized protocol for money, other coins aren't, it's not a big deal.

Cryptocurrency is intended to be decentralised, to have privacy and security. A vanity address provides the opposite of privacy, which is traceability and publicity. This needs not be a weakness but can become a strength. Vanity addresses are hard to generate since they are almost random and getting the exact prefix (or string within the address) is exponentially unlikely. It is also why private addresses cannot be derived from public addresses, for hashing is a one-way function.

I've not seen much from namecoin devs here in a while, and the forum looks pretty dead. However, Twitter @Namecoin looks like it gets posted to somewhat regularly (not much in November tho) and the GitHub namecoin-core repo is receiving commits regularly... even if a lot of them are just merges from bitcoin-core.

Judging by your username, you're asking for something like Namecoin.

What problem does Mastodon solve? Just non-Twitter shortform social networking? What about Diaspora, PeerTube, etc?

Not being beholden to a central authority (whether that authority be Twitter, PayPal, or the US government) is intrinsically valuable to a lot of people. Blockchains are just a convenient and proven way of enabling that sort of independence.

Granted, decentralization is a bit of a niche, and the cryptocurrency gold rush has made it way more mainstream than it has any right to be at this point in time given it's current drawbacks. But that doesn't mean it's not valuable.

As for blockchain specifically: yes, decentralized payments seems to be the primary use case. But once you have a decentralized payments system, that enables the creation of a whole bunch of other decentralized applications that would not have otherwise been possible. That's why most "blockchain" projects start with a currency and then build from there: it's hard to build [decentralized cloud storage][1] or [decentralized DNS][2] without first having a decentralized way to pay for those services.

[1]: https://sia.tech/

[2]: https://www.namecoin.org/

Description: Namecoin (NMC) is a cryptocurrency . Users are able to generate NMC through the process of mining. Namecoin has a current supply of 14,736,400. The last known price of Namecoin is 1.42769184 USD and is up 3.58 over the last 24 hours. It is currently trading on 7 active market(s) with $7,523.53 traded over the last 24 hours. More information can be found at https://www.namecoin.org/.

Yes, it's interesting.

This has been known and ocassionally touted for AGES. I've attempted to start a couple of such projects and have been following the progress of other projects with similar ideas.

There has been near ZERO interest for them, because there's no currently viable business case for such projects, except "let the government pay for it." Data mining isn't THAT useful if there's no data in there - who would force entities like companies, universities or the SEC to push the data into the blockchain?

I'd be very happy if could find funding for https://github.com/WOTvision/wot1 and I can see a business case for it as a potential platform for legal, paid distribution of news between creators/reporters and distributors like news portals. But even so, no takers.

Sigh. Some day I hope I can get this project funded: https://github.com/WOTvision/wot1

"This is a repository containing an implementation of a blockchain which supports an unique feature set: asserting trust of information organised in JSON documents.

The goal is to have a global public notary service, for people and corporations to issue signed statements which are globally recognized and verifyable, which are identified by a QR code, which the media and news channels can reproduce and which can be verified by the consumers of information (i.e. ordinary people). The vision is to combat fake news by using a thing blockchains are very good at: distributing reliable data, and by providing a low-tech user-centric interface to it, which everyone can use to verify random junk they hear on the media."