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namecoin / proposals

Standards and Best Practices
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Should we support a "for sale" flag? #16

Open hlandau opened 9 years ago

hlandau commented 9 years ago

@phelix From https://forum.namecoin.info/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2325

This wouldn't be hard to do. "forsale":true would work, and the existing WHOIS information could act as the point of sale information.

OTOH, it probably encourages squatting.

JeremyRand commented 9 years ago

I think you tagged the wrong person; phelix's username is @phelixbtc .

I can see that being able to see whether a name is for sale is useful, but I'm not sure that a boolean really is sufficient. Let's say I'm squatting on a name associated with some entity, and I intend to only sell (or give it away) to that entity. An arbitrary string would be better than a boolean for describing this.

There is also some overlap with marketplace applications like OpenBazaar, which I'd like to leverage for name sales.

indolering commented 9 years ago

I think the flag would just add clutter without making sales any easier. They can specify as much in the comment field and leave contact info. I think the only thing we could do to ease sales is to provide a built-in mechanism for submitting bids.

JeremyRand commented 9 years ago

@hlandau @indolering I guess a question is, is this field intended to be machine-parseable, and if so, for what applications? If it's not intended to be machine-parseable, then a generic comment field is probably sufficient, given that we already have fields for contact info. If it is intended to be machine-parseable, what does that give us that systems like OpenBazaar don't already provide?

indolering commented 9 years ago

@JeremyRand I would argue that we should only standardize on a spec for machine readable "for sale" information when someone has a concrete proposal for such a system, plans to build it, and can articulate how this tag would help. As is, we are trying to anticipate future needs instead of just allowing it to be built organically.