Whitepaper
Bitcoin was fully implemented by the same person (Satoshi Nakamoto) who in large part designed it (based on pre-genesis research by Adam Back, Wei Dai, David Chaum, and Nick Szabo, among others). For this reason, a single “Bitcoin Whitepaper” exists. In contrast, Namecoin was implemented by a developer (Vincent Durham) who had no prior involvement in the design (he just did a code-drop). As such, there is no single “Namecoin whitepaper”, as Namecoin’s design is not attributable to a single person. There do, however, exist several whitepaper-ish documents by pre-genesis researchers. These are the closest things to a “Namecoin whitepaper” that exist.
- Names: Distributed, Secure, Human-Readable: Choose Two (Zooko Wilcox)
- Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority (Nick Szabo)
- I had an idea for a bitcoin-like DNS system (Appamatto et al)
- Why not just generate “domain credits”? (Theymos, Appamatto, et al)
- BitDNS and Generalizing Bitcoin (Appamatto, Satoshi Nakamoto, et al)
- Squaring the Triangle: Secure, Decentralized, Human-Readable Names (Aaron Swartz)
- Spelunking the Triangle: Exploring Aaron Swartz’s Take On Zooko’s Triangle (Dan Kaminsky)
- Namecoin - a distributed naming system based on Bitcoin (Vincent Durham)