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Many Bitcoin mining pools offer merged mining with Namecoin, and there are places where one can buy and sell BTC for NMC and the other way around.
But, why would anyone want to own NMC? As far as I understand, browsing dot-bit domains doesn't require owning NMC.
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Namecoins are used to register .bit domains:
http://dot-bit.org/HowToRegisterAndConfigureBitDomains
They're also bought and sold by speculators, but DNS registration is their original purpose.
2Thanks for your answer, but I still don't understand. Buying an .bit domain costs bitcoin. You don't pay for the domain with nmc. And browsing .bit is free. Why then would anyone want to own nmc? If the answer is merely speculation, why would anyone in the future maybe want to own nmc? – Martin Josefsson – 2011-12-10T19:48:54.217
4If you're using bitcoins (or dollars, etc.) to buy a .bit domain, you're paying someone to use their namecoins to actually register that domain. – Chris Acheson – 2011-12-10T20:35:55.520
2There's also all the same reasons Bitcoins have value. They're scarce, fungible, easily exchangeable, pseudonymous, and so on. – David Schwartz – 2011-11-22T21:51:22.683