[hurin]

> I have a mild bias against altcoins, and have heard bad things about Namecoin in particular: that the anti-spam incentives aren't good, leading to illegal files stored in the blockchain itself, and that there's no compact representation (like Bitcoin's Simplified Payment Verification) for determining whether a claimed name is valid without consulting a full history.

Security-wise Namecoin is a weaker Blockchain, but I think in this case it's not that important. -- Are not the anti-spam measures hurting users as much as spammers in this case? Since you end up with higher-costs for what is otherwise practically free with a centralized service.

From the looks of it there is no reason that Bitcoin's Simplified Payment Verification wouldn't be usable with Namecoin either.

edit: Also this may be interesting to take a look at https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/vandenhooff-ver...