Namecoin Forum

I am afraid merged mining will harm/destroy namecoin or at least drastically reduce the value of namecoins. Maybe merged mining should be tried with a crappy fork first.

Why? From some point of view every miner gets namecoins for free with merged mining. Free coins means a very low price. The only work the price will reflect is the hassle the pool operators have to implement merged mining.

I'd be happy if someone can rebut my doubts.

Let's make some assumptions:

- the namecoin network upgrade to a new merged mining codebase will be a success
- merged mining will work, with namecoin aux'ing off parent chain bitcoin
- enough pools implement merged mining to have a continued effect on the namecoin network

Result?

- namecoin network hash rate increases
- a series of quick namecoin difficulty changes until namecoin and bitcoin difficulty reach parity


So no 'free namecoins', just an increased speed of coin creation based on higher hashing rates. Same thing that would happen if namecoin suddenly got a ton of press and had lots of new miners come in.

If the price goes down, or up, or stays the same, the real question is: how will it effect name registration and updates? A decrease in NMC price would make name registration cheaper, and possibly more attractive.

hmm. let me put it like this:

mining now you get either bitcoins or namecoins, most people chose bitcoins because of higher profitability. but with merged mining you can get both.

mining = bitcoins
merged_mining = bitcoins + namecoins
--> merged_mining - mining = namecoins
merged_mining - mining = 0_effort
--> namecoins = 0_effort
--> namecoins = 0_value

it is very much like throwing free namecoins at the bitcoin miners. they are simply gonna sell them for whatever little btc they can get for them because they do not give a damn about namecoin and rightfully so.

at least nobody knows what will happen. that alone is enough reason for me not to switch to the merged mining client.

forks are popping up like mushrooms, I hope one of them will try merged mining, fail quickly and thus stop the whole merged mining thing.

I'm a bit confused. Are you worried about a Namecoin price drop, or worried about the effect on the namecoin network for its intended purpose of name registrations and updates?

I'm only concerned with the later.

zamgo wrote:I'm a bit confused. Are you worried about a Namecoin price drop, or worried about the effect on the namecoin network for its intended purpose of name registrations and updates?

I'm only concerned with the later.

I'm worried about a Namecoin price drop. Agreed, that alone would not be so bad but it will also hurt the system. Because if registration is too cheap people will register every word their scripts can think of (I would at least). (Maybe I am missing something here about the way the price for registering is determined.)

Actually I'm very bullish about namecoin after merged mining (MM).
What I think will happen is that bitcoin mining will become unprofitable.
After MM, namecoins haven't lost any of the qualities that give them value, just the opposite, the difficulty rises making the namecoin network more secure and giving them more value.

Now btc miners that don't mine nmc too will have less profit than merged miners and won't be able to compete with them.
Since they can sell both btc and nmc and make more dollars/euros/whatever to pay the electricity bills, the difficulty of bitcoin will also rise.

The only problem I can really forsee is some kind of backlash or revolt amongst mining pools for whatever reason.

Imagine that deepbit.net decides to take us up on the mergined mining offer after block 24k, if only to place a few hundred thousand namecoins in tycho's personal pocket without telling the miners (Who would know right? I'm not actually suggesting he would..)

And then... just stop for some reason (trolling, backlash, revolt, etc...)

We would be absolutely screwed. Transactions would probably take days or more and the next difficulty decrease wouldn't come for 10 years.

gigabytecoin wrote:The only problem I can really forsee is some kind of backlash or revolt amongst mining pools for whatever reason.

Imagine that deepbit.net decides to take us up on the mergined mining offer after block 24k, if only to place a few hundred thousand namecoins in tycho's personal pocket without telling the miners (Who would know right? I'm not actually suggesting he would..)

And then... just stop for some reason (trolling, backlash, revolt, etc...)

We would be absolutely screwed. Transactions would probably take days or more and the next difficulty decrease wouldn't come for 10 years.

Why don't change the retarget to 2016 blocks or two weeks, whatever happens first?
The "mine a lot a leave" could be considered an attack.

gigabytecoin wrote: Imagine that deepbit.net decides to take us up on the mergined mining ... without telling the miners (Who would know right? I'm not actually suggesting he would..)

Wouldn't it be possible to create a 'merged mining tracking' service? If there is something unique in the merged-mined blocks (extended length of coinbase, for example) then each new bitcoin block can be examined to determine if it was created via merged-mining. Tracking this down to individual pool level would be another issue.

jtimon wrote: Why don't change the retarget to 2016 blocks or two weeks, whatever happens first?
The "mine a lot a leave" could be considered an attack.

Because anything involving 'real world time' to decide when to change difficulty will be problematic with the different clock times in clients.