OneName and OpenNameSystem appear to be trying to avoid any association with Namecoin despite the fact that they use it. Both projects have no mention of Namecoin (they just say "blockchain") on their websites and a lot of the documentation isn't very clear on this. What gives?

Are we looking at the same website, or have they changed it since you made your comment? "ONS currently uses namecoin as a key-value store but the system is blockchain-agnostic" is on the first screen after the fold for me.

I'm 99% sure that wasn't there when I made that comment - I had done ^F namecoin to check.

I think the reason they don't say Namecoin explicitly is because at the end of the day, it doesn't particularly matter which *coin's blockchain gets used. At this point in the course of distributed system design, a "blockchain" can be thought of as a building-block for a system, and the matter of which particular blockchain gets used is an implementation detail.

>I think the reason they don't say Namecoin explicitly is because at the end of the day, it doesn't particularly matter which *coin's blockchain gets used.

I disagree. It matters a lot how much hashpower a given Blockchain has, else it can be easily destroyed (through forking) and/or interfered with (50% attacks). So Bitcoin has by far the most secure blockchain.

> it doesn't particularly matter which 'coin's blockchain gets used.

Well, except that it does, because depending on the blockchain used, you are dealing with different consensus protocols, and most importantly, different people. Namecoin is a worthy project, has been doing its noble thing for quite some time, and deserves at least a mention if this project is going to be working off of the sweat its core devs have put into it (and continue to do so).