Another incident that tells us we need to move towards something more decentralized. Namecoin is an excellent concept and idea, it's a pity it is not used and supported more widely.
The only thing we know is that they were under sealed court order.
Namecoin is not a magical solution to every problem with domain registration, and it barely scratches the surface of the decentralization issue as it's pretty cheap for anyone with the budget of a nation state to 'recentralize' the namecoin system, let alone a $5 wrench.
When it comes to things being seized under sealed court order, the authorities usually don't have a problem finding a wrench.
I actually do some work on Namecoin, and need to post in that thread. The current namecoind is based on a horribly old version of bitcoin, and we could really use some donations to help get a rewrite against something more maintainable done.
More of the issue is that it's really hard to set up. It's getting better with things like DNSChain, but it's still not exactly something a non-technical person can get going with in 10 minutes. It's also not something you can use on your phone safely yet.
It's not going to be something that legitimate companies are going to use for their primary domain name for a long time. More than that, it's going to be used in niche applications - decentralised identity (id/ rather than u/), primarily, along with being used as a name service for things like OpenBazaar and maybe Tor.
On the other hand, if you happen to run a company or project and have some form of cryptocurrency, you might as well exchange some of that for namecoins and register d/whatever, just in case.
What if the 5,000 domains were seized and shut down to prevent a massive worm that had compromised millions of computers and would result in massive theft against millions of consumers?
In the vast majority of cases law enforcement and court actions against domains are justifiable and benefit the internet.
In that case why would it be a sealed court order? Also if sealed court orders are involved and we assume we don't know about all of them, how can you possibly make claims regarding "the vast majority"?
