Sorry, but actually you do. The block is a chunk of data including the nonce. The hash of the block is just that: SHA(block). If you change even one bit of the block (e.g. by incrementing the nonce by 1), the hash of the block will change completely. That's the whole point of hash functions. Go back to the Satoshi paper if this is confusing. At no point is there any reason to "hash the nonce". It is the hash of the whole block (including the nonce) which must be below the difficulty limit.jtimon wrote:When you hash a message, you hash it in blocks.hashman wrote: Well I like the algebra but I think there is a problem here because the block formally contains the nonce. You can see them in the block explorers. Last NMC block (18903) had inside it
Nonce: 2250928270
The nonce alone is never hashed, the hash is done of the whole block which contains the nonce. So indeed you ARE repeatedly hashing the block.
Hash(Hash(Hash(Block1), Block2), Block3)
If the nounce is the last data block you hash, you don't have to re-hash the whole bitcoin/namecoin block for every nounce you try.
Your gold & silver analogy is less than pleasing. For gold & silver miners there is no hard limit on the amount of gold and silver pulled from the earth every 10 minutes. For BTC / NMC there is a hard limit: 50 BTC / 10 min & 100 NMC / 10 min.
I can already mine for both by using a pool that picks between which one to mine in the getWork function or by running an instance of each.
Let me reiterate: even if the new code is perfect and LukeJr. was bluffing about his exploit, the difficulty will just go up and you will be mining at the same profitability as before.
Merged mining gets the gas face.