Difficulty has increased to 55882!

[moa]

I think for any new bitcoin related currencies learning from the namecoin experience, one thing to do would be to reduce the difficulty adjustment time. It's too easy for big power to come and go causing having with block times.

Hopefully at some point a cross miner will be created to avoid this problem.

A cross miner has some snags of its own. It will effectively lock the NMC price to BTC price, unless the block solve rates are different in which case it will lock them at that ratio.

It is better if namecoin avoids cross mining if possible and builds in fail-safe to adjust difficulty after 2016 blocks OR 14 days, whichever comes first. Locking in with BTC could be catastrophic if BTC fails for legal/politcial reasons that have nothing to do with NMC.

[JohnDoe]

I don't see how cross mining would lock the exchange rate, in fact I would expect the opposite to happen. Since there would be no additional cost to mining both block chains simultaneously (other than a little extra disk space and bandwidth), we would see NMC traded at their actual market value rather than at the rate of mining difficulty. At first I'd expect the value of NMC to drop by quite a bit because the miners that don't care about Namecoin will just try to get rid of them as soon as possible, but since now the network is as secure as Bitcoin then merchants might be more willing to accept NMC for goods and services, making the price more competitive (possibly going over BTC parity at some point because of its added value).

[moa]

I don't see how cross mining would lock the exchange rate, in fact I would expect the opposite to happen. Since there would be no additional cost to mining both block chains simultaneously (other than a little extra disk space and bandwidth), we would see NMC traded at their actual market value rather than at the rate of mining difficulty. At first I'd expect the value of NMC to drop by quite a bit because the miners that don't care about Namecoin will just try to get rid of them as soon as possible, but since now the network is as secure as Bitcoin then merchants might be more willing to accept NMC for goods and services, making the price more competitive (possibly going over BTC parity at some point because of its added value).

You've basically stated the answer to yourself. If namecoin and bitcoin are subject to the same hashpower, via crossmining or otherwise, the btc-nmc price ratio that is locked onto the difficulty ratio via the exchanges, will lock onto the difficulty ratio of close to 1.

Unless the block solving rates are hard-coded to be different ... it was already discussed over at forum.bitcoin.org about shared work.

https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7219.80

[drknark]

How would a crossminer work? Wouldn't the blocks for each chain be different due to including some info from previous blocks?

[MaxSan]

Its a bad idea to keep them locked together. each should thrive in their own right.


Think of them as two brothers.

[misterbigg]

Think of them as two brothers.

What have you been smoking? You don't make any sense.

/dev/null

[imperi]

Think of them as two brothers.

What have you been smoking? You don't make any sense.

/dev/null

I think you should win the prize for "First Namecoin forum troll". Congrats.

[MaxSan]

Just cause they came from the same code they shouldnt be locked down to behave as one another.

Makes perfect sense brah.

[JohnDoe]

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?

[moa]

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.