I'd be much more interested in a blockchain designed to secure other sources of data than one that attempts to store data itself (NMC or DTC). Hashes and signatures of important files, personal and corporate public keys, etc.
You can put file hashes in Datacoin, no? If we made a coin that only allowed storing hashes, folks could just encoded their data to make it look like hashes.
Unless...we could build a system that would allow storing of hashes but only after somehow verifying that the submitter actually possessed data of a nontrivial size which produced that hash value. So maybe a little less like regular hashing and a little more like public-key encryption? Just a thought.
Well, obviously you could never entirely prevent abuse (as bitcoin shows), only make it costly. Low fixed limits on storage size would at least keep people from throwing an avi in most of the time.
I think maybe hashes wouldn't make much sense, though, anyways. If you were say ubuntu and you wanted to make your releases verifiable through the blockchain you'd just put a public key in under ubuntu.releases and it'd be the signature of the file matching that would matter.
When it comes right down to it I guess I basically want a namespaced, blockchain-verified, pgp. With maybe more flexibility about key types so you could throw things like ssh keys or bitcoin addresses or such in. Or maybe dnscurve/dnssec keys.
And yeah, you could use either namecoin or datacoin to do this, but I think they're trying to be too much and that will be a problem. Could you imagine how big a block chain that contained the entirety of dns as it exists now would be? There's a reason the internet moved from distributing a hosts file to everyone.
