JohnDoe wrote:I still don't get the argument against cross mining. Would you rather stay at a difficulty of ~15,000 with annoying cycles of very fast retargets followed by a very slow one instead of having a difficulty of 2+ million and retargeting every 2 weeks?
This has only happened once so far. My guess is it will repeat somewhat but nowhere near as bad as the last pump 'n dump. I think that was an artificat that namecoin was 'discovered' and came of age.
You have to look further out to see why it may not be a good idea to tie bitcoin to namecoin in a 1-to-1 fashion like cross-mining will do. Tying mining together will tie their economics together. At present, the economic outlay for hardware/energy to get namecoin is 0.035 that of bitcoin. Making namecoin diff. equal to bitcoin diff. will make them both equally expensive to mine. Essentially all the namecoins in existence will just become part of the bitcoin float. Sure it may mean than namecoins and bitcoins will come to be equal in value but it is a faustian pact. Namecoins fate will be tied to that of bitcoin. Is it worth the risk?
If the two were kept separate economically, bitcoin could have a crash that would not crash namecoins at the same time. If they go their separate ways economically they can compete on their respective merits and efforts of their community of users to spread them into wider use. Cross-mining will prevent this from happening in the long term I think. I can be persuaded otherwise but I haven't seen any good arguments from vinced, or anyone else.
Competing currencies are known to engender stronger economic systems than monopolistic currency regimes. For the crypto-currency movement as a whole a separate, strong namecoin blockchain is a must I think. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.