Namecoin

Namecoin is a distributed domain name system and digital currency based on the Bitcoin technology. Namecoin extends Bitcoin to add transactions for registering, updating and transferring domain names. Namecoin provides an alternative to the existing domain name system (DNS), in which names can be taken from their owners by groups that control the DNS servers.
Unlike the current DNS, Namecoin avoids central authorities and issuers. Namecoin uses a distributed database spread across nodes of a peer-to-peer network to journal transactions, and uses digital signatures and proof-of-work to provide basic security functions, such as ensuring that domain names can be transferred only by their owner.
Namecoin supports the same distributed and cryptographic currency functions used by Bitcoin, and closely mirrors Bitcoin in its workings, as it began as a fork of the Bitcoin project.
History
On November 29, 2010, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (U.S. ICE) issued seizure orders against 82 Web sites with .com Internet addresses that were reported to be involved in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods. As registry operator for .com, Verisign performed the required takedowns of the 82 sites under order from law enforcement. The removal of the 82 Websites appears to have been an impetus for the launch of Namecoin. The removal was also cited as an impetus for the launch of "the Dot-P2P Project" in order to create a decentralized DNS service without centralized registry operators. Following the disappearance of the Wikileaks during the following week and its forced move to wikileaks.ch, a Swiss domain, the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned of the dangers of having key pieces of Internet infrastructure such as DNS name translation under corporate control.

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