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Why should miners be mining right now?

Posted: Sun Jul 31, 2011 9:42 pm
by whamma
I've got a considerable (~100Ghash) pool of servers that I'm currently doing bitcoin mining with. I've been playing with namecoin, and I think it's an awesome idea, but there are a few things holding me back from contributing some horsepower behind mining for it right now.

1) The current difficulty/network hash rate is severely mismatched. I know it will correct itself, but that'll be a few months down the road. The side effect of this is that getting the required 120(or 100 if i really wanted) confirmations to make any mined blocks valid is taking a lot longer than what most miners would like. While it's up lately, it looks like there have been some days that have had only a handful of blocks found. The longer mined blocks take to mature the more "risk" there is in that something is going to wrong in the market during that period, which makes it a harder sell than just doing bit coin mining. Also, knowing that waiting a while will produce much more than jumping in at the moment is giving everyone an incentive to just wait, which is going to extend the current difficulty period even further.

2) Unless I'm misunderstanding something, if the proposed merged mining proposal happens, that's going to make namecoins much more plentiful after that happens, which is most likely going to depress their value further. That's going to make miners want to sell off before that happens, which is going to make values go down well in advance of that happening. (i.e. now)

I don't mean to sound super negative, but this is making it really difficult to talk myself into mining, which I know the project needs right now to get out of this insanely high difficulty period. Can anyone argue any counterpoints to these for me? :)

Re: Why should miners be mining right now?

Posted: Sun Jul 31, 2011 10:00 pm
by talpan
In my opinion, you should at least give namecoin some hashingpower and/or buy namecoins with bitcoins.
As you stated right, I'll take almost forever to get somewhere.
There is still the idea of merged mining (mining bitcoin and namecoin at the same time).
It is planned to "enable" merged mining at namecoinblock 24000, as far as I can see it, this will be faar in the future. Now, if you contribute some of your mhashes to namecoin,
it will be more likely to happen in a reasonable timeframe.

regards, talpan

Re: Why should miners be mining right now?

Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2011 4:50 am
by smoothie
whamma wrote:I've got a considerable (~100Ghash) pool of servers that I'm currently doing bitcoin mining with. I've been playing with namecoin, and I think it's an awesome idea, but there are a few things holding me back from contributing some horsepower behind mining for it right now.

1) The current difficulty/network hash rate is severely mismatched. I know it will correct itself, but that'll be a few months down the road. The side effect of this is that getting the required 120(or 100 if i really wanted) confirmations to make any mined blocks valid is taking a lot longer than what most miners would like. While it's up lately, it looks like there have been some days that have had only a handful of blocks found. The longer mined blocks take to mature the more "risk" there is in that something is going to wrong in the market during that period, which makes it a harder sell than just doing bit coin mining. Also, knowing that waiting a while will produce much more than jumping in at the moment is giving everyone an incentive to just wait, which is going to extend the current difficulty period even further.

2) Unless I'm misunderstanding something, if the proposed merged mining proposal happens, that's going to make namecoins much more plentiful after that happens, which is most likely going to depress their value further. That's going to make miners want to sell off before that happens, which is going to make values go down well in advance of that happening. (i.e. now)

I don't mean to sound super negative, but this is making it really difficult to talk myself into mining, which I know the project needs right now to get out of this insanely high difficulty period. Can anyone argue any counterpoints to these for me? :)

I've outlined several points about the total supply of namecoins and bitcoins. Namecoins will likely be more scarce than bitcoins for a few years at the very least.

The fact that namecoins have a usage in addition to all that bitcoins do gives namecoin an edge over bitcoins.

Re: Why should miners be mining right now?

Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:58 am
by bitcoinua
How about just for idea

Re: Why should miners be mining right now?

Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2011 12:59 pm
by Davincij15
whamma wrote: 2) Unless I'm misunderstanding something, if the proposed merged mining proposal happens, that's going to make namecoins much more plentiful after that happens, which is most likely going to depress their value further. That's going to make miners want to sell off before that happens, which is going to make values go down well in advance of that happening. (i.e. now)
Wow 100Ghash eh? I have 10Ghash and I am get 3.5 BTC so I was thinking of doing the same thing.

I feel that most people do not mine with the intent to cash out right away thus you can't expect that to happen.

BTW I have a namecoin pool at http://nmcbit.com if you sign up and throw 1 Ghash my way I will hook you up with a 5% fee on PPS for life (once I get it Pay-Per-Share going) thus reducing your variance.

Cheers
Davinci
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Re: Why should miners be mining right now?

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 3:48 am
by vinced
whamma wrote: ...
2) Unless I'm misunderstanding something, if the proposed merged mining proposal happens, that's going to make namecoins much more plentiful after that happens, which is most likely going to depress their value further. That's going to make miners want to sell off before that happens, which is going to make values go down well in advance of that happening. (i.e. now)
...
The target block rate will still be 10 minutes and the difficulty will adjust accordingly. Namecoins will not be generated faster than they would have been under the old rules.

The supply of namecoins will always be behind that of bitcoins.