As was previously announced, I (Jeremy Rand) represented Namecoin at 36C3 in Leipzig, Germany. As usual, it was an excellent event. As usual for conferences that I attend, I engaged in a large number of conversations with other attendees. Also as usual, I won’t be publicly disclosing the content of those conversations, because I want people to be able to talk to me at conferences without worrying that off-the-cuff comments will be broadcast to the public.

Namecoin gave 2 talks, as well as a workshop, all of which were hosted by the Monero Assembly and the Critical Decentralization Cluster (CDC). Below are the slides and videos of Namecoin’s talks, as well as the notes from Namecoin’s workshop. The videos can be viewed via youtube-dl (Debian package) (recommendation by Whonix) if you don’t trust YouTube’s JavaScript (and there’s no reason why you should trust YouTube’s JavaScript!).

Lightning Talk: Intro to Namecoin

Speaker: Jeremy Rand

Namecoin is a blockchain (first project forked from Bitcoin) that implements a decentralized DNS and public key infrastructure, which is resistant to censorship, hijacking, and other tampering. This talk will explain the basics of how Namecoin works and what it can be used for.

Slides are here.

Video is here.

Russian translation is here.

Lecture: Adventures and Experiments Adding Namecoin to Tor Browser

Speaker: Jeremy Rand

The Namecoin and Tor developers are running a new experiment: the GNU/Linux Nightly Builds of Tor Browser now have optional support for resolving Namecoin’s .bit domains. This experiment aims to provide a fix for the long-standing UX problem with .onion domains: the lack of human-meaningful names. With Namecoin, you can access onion services via nice, memorable addresses like http://federalistpapers.bit/ instead of http://7fa6xlti5joarlmkuhjaifa47ukgcwz6tfndgax45ocyn4rixm632jid.onion/ . In this talk, I’ll cover the goals of the experiment, the work that went into getting here, and the work that remains to be done.

Disclaimer: Although the work covered in this talk is a collaboration between Namecoin and Tor, this talk is solely from Namecoin’s perspective.

Slides are here.

Video is here.

Workshop: Demo and Discussion: Namecoin in Tor Browser

Workshop Host: Jeremy Rand

The Namecoin and Tor developers are running a new experiment: the GNU/Linux Nightly Builds of Tor Browser now have optional support for resolving Namecoin’s .bit domains. This experiment aims to provide a fix for the long-standing UX problem with .onion domains: the lack of human-meaningful names. With Namecoin, you can access onion services via nice, memorable addresses like http://federalistpapers.bit/ instead of http://7fa6xlti5joarlmkuhjaifa47ukgcwz6tfndgax45ocyn4rixm632jid.onion/ . In this workshop, you’ll be able to try it out yourself. Bring a GNU/Linux machine (bare-metal or VM are both fine). After the demo, I’d love your feedback on what our next steps should be in this area.

I highly recommend attending my talk “Adventures and Experiments Adding Namecoin to Tor Browser” prior to this workshop, but this is not a hard requirement; attendees who didn’t attend that talk are still welcome.

Disclaimer: Although the work covered in this workshop is a collaboration between Namecoin and Tor, this workshop is solely from Namecoin’s perspective.

Notes are here.

Thanks

Huge thank you to the following groups who facilitated our participation:

We’re looking forward to 37C3 in December 2020!

This work was funded by NLnet Foundation’s Internet Hardening Fund and Cyphrs.