I think that certain people have conclusions they like to jump to and they do so without properly reading the post they are replying to. It's also easy to infer criticism or an attack where none is meant.

Nobody is seriously suggesting anymore that one can prevent using the bitcoin chain to store data. People want to store data in the block chain to implement certain functionality and if we can facilitate the functionality by some other more convenient method then they will use that instead. Alt-chains attempts to do that.

[mike]'s proposal boils down to having miners who support alternative block chains incorporating a hash for one or more block chains in the coinbase transaction for the bitcoin blocks they're mining.

One drawback is that the people distributing the generic bitcoin client could pull the plug on all the alternative block chains by having their client reject blocks which have a non-standard coinbase. As alt-chain-compatible blocks would not be accepted and relayed by clients, the alt-chain supporting miners would essentially drop off the network. The bitcoin network would experience a drop in hashing power as these clients left but would otherwise continue unaffected.

I don't know whether the possibility of this kill-switch would be acceptable for the alt-chain users.

ByteCoin

Why would anyone want to kill off alternative chains so badly?

And yeah I agree with ByteCoin. "Preventing" abuse is really hard, often impossible. Making it senseless or pointless is quite easy and how nearly all abuse control works. Bitcoin will never be a good way to store arbitrary data just because it wasn't meant for that. There's almost always a better tool for your problem.

Sorry, I'm not a very technical person. Are you saying that a DNS system can be implemented on top of Bitcoin without needing to make any changes to the protocol or ask for permission from anyone? If so then doesn't that make Namecoin worthless or is a new block chain with new transaction types still technically superior than this method?

Yeah, I know the opposing views on the subject. I'm asking purely from a technical standpoint if your system has any limitation that Namecoin doesn't have, thus making the existence of Namecoin still worthwhile even if bitDNS is implemented. I ask because I was planning on investing in Namecoin but I'm afraid that if it becomes a threat to Bitcoin (which I think it will if Bitcoin remains purely for financial transactions forever) then your system will be widely supported and implement, thus crashing the value of namecoins.

BitDNS can't use Bitcoin's lightweight client mode, so in the future it will always be rare for people to run their own BitDNS resolvers. I don't know if Namecoin is set up to use client mode, either, though. BitDNS probably requires more resources, too, since servers need to scan all non-DNS transactions.

I think Namecoin is broken for other reasons, though:
https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7244.msg106438#msg106438

Yes. Our spec handles this by requiring DNS renewals. There are ways to handle it more elegantly, though (using multiple 0-value outputs, for example). The spec was written a while ago.

An output with 0 value is valid, and these outputs can't be forgotten by the network until they are spent (which is also valid). So you can stuff all of the DNS data into several of those outputs.

When the bitDNS spec was written, having more than two outputs was not considered standard; therefore, it was difficult to get those transactions into blocks. Now they are standard.

That's only if >50% of the mining power agrees to do that. I doubt it will ever happen.

I argued against that notion in the thread: