Bitcoin Forum

I noticed a pretty serious uptick in namecoin mining, enough to jump the expected difficulty drop date from august to mid july. What is causing the sudden interest in namecoin mining all of a sudden? Still seems like a losing proposition at the current price / difficulty, or are people just eager to get the difficulty down so they can get it up again? hah.

Namecoin price jumped up almost 50% a couple days ago, if you didn't notice. Since then it went back down, however.

On this moment, is more profitable (for me) to mine namecoins and then exchange them to btc later :)

That happend because BTC price droped and people was looking for an alternative.

You can give it a try and mine some NCs at PoolMunity.com (https://poolmunity.com)


regards, talpan

That seems very unlikely. Namecoins are traded for 0.033 - 0.034, and the difficulty ratio between Namecoin and Bitcoin is 0.0357.

You are still far better off mining BTC than NMC, that is if you are after dollar profit. But, the next NMC mining difficulty adjustment will be a decrease (50% ish), and we will see another rush on the NMC, as long as the NMC price stays as it is or rises.

NMC / BTC difficulty adjustment forecast tables
http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

Get ready to hit NMC in 6 days time :)

I am mining Namecoins, because my prefered BTC-pool (BTCguild) is down ;)

If you are mining Namecoin, I'd need a little bit of help, starting a new Namecoin/Bitcoin.
I'd appreciate it :).

regards, talpan

I did exactly the same thing, then realised the difficulty is still too high for NMC, so I switched to Slush's pool.

I would have gone to Deepbit, but that email they are supposed to send when activating/recovering an account, just won't come through, so I gave up.

It does look like more people are going over to NMC. I'll wait till the decrease in difficulty.

NMC mining batch files at the ready :)

I tried to use slush's pool, but i failed :-\
Can't get a connection. I think my username or the host are wrong.
Anyway, i'll wait for btcguild to come back while I'm mining NMC :)

How do I mine namecoin with several workers without a pool (i.e. solo)?

yu mine solo namecoins the same as you do bitcoin.

go to namecoins.us.. download their hacked version of the bitcoin client.

set up rpcuser and rpcpass and point your miner at 127.0.0.1 instead of teh pool.


as for namecoins, is it me or is the price, sorta linked to bitcoins difficulty?  seems like it adjusts sometimes to keep it just barely under bitcoin in profitability.

well everytime i have checked the namecoin calculators, i tend to get a couple dollars less a month than on the bitcoin ones, even right after the bitcoin difficulty jump.

Right now, it seems that mining for BTC and buying NMC might be a good idea.

People who are mining Namecoin at the moment are doing it because they believe in Namecoin.  They like the idea and they want it to succeed.  It's no different than people who are putting time and effort into Bitcoin because they like the idea and they want it to succeed.  And Namecoin won't succeed if the hashing power is so low that anyone can trivially take over the network, or if new blocks are being found very infrequently because the difficulty rocketed up when it was more lucrative than Bitcoin mining, but then everyone left when it wasn't.

i am mining namecoins

but really it's silly, as it's more profitable to mine BTC...

which means, you can mine bitcoins then trade them for namecoins and have more namecoins than if you was soloing mining them (on average)..

BUT (again)... I like the gambling feeling of solo mining and getting 50 name coins :)

Namecoins are more fun to mine because you get more of them. I know it's silly, but that's how it is to me. Of course I just have my one gaming computer. Also nobody is DDOSing the pool.

There, we have our answer.  People who can't or won't do math are mining namecoins.

Good by me, it just means instead of the difficulty drop on the 21st it looks like it'll be around the 11th instead.  THAT is when the great BTC hordes will descend on namecoin once again, mine out all 2016 blocks in a day or so, and leave the chumps to 'support' another month mining at an artificially bogus difficulty.

Y'all are giving up .07 per namecoin by mining NMC rather than BTC at current exchange rates.  Good thing you make up for those losses with higher volume! 

In a free market (which this is), and assuming rational actors we would have everyone mining BTC and buying NMC until NMC reached price parity.  That's how rational people would support NMC.  The current subsidy yoyo with NMC miners lining up to *give* money to BTC miners for destabilizing NMC will have predictable effects.

So wait, what you're saying is it's fun to have fewer namecoins than more?  At the end of the day you just see a balance -- your balance would be higher by mining BTC, even with one card or CPU and *buying* NMC.  Higher numbers are more fun than lower numbers, or did I misunderstand?

When you buy Namecoins, you need to buy upwards and you lose sometimes several percentage points of value.

That's exactly the same with bitcoin.

So essentially, I start namecoind, then point my guiminer at 127.0.0.1?

Yes, after you're running namecoind and set rpcpass and rpcuser.
Or you could join a (my ;) pool.



regards, talpan

Hmmm.. this means I'll have to set up namecoin in every computer rather than just the miner though.

I'll check out your pool, thanks.

That's true, you'd have to do this and your miners wouldn't be connected.

And I know my pool isn't big yet but we will get some namecoins soon :).


regards, talpan

No, download namecoind from wherever (I don't know if this is what talpan is referring to), I used dot-bit.org, follow the instructions to set it up, you can now point regular miners to the computer running namecoind and it will work as a localized pool (not that that really matters, it just makes life easier for you with a centralized wallet).

I still don't really see any good explanation in this thread for people mining namecoins, the price jumped and then it dropped, so it's still a losing proposition. When the difficulty drops, bitcoin miners are going to rape namecoin, and flood the market so prices will certainly not go up in the near future (~1week), meaning if it's unprofitable now, it will only be more so in the near future.

I suppose the people who like namecoin and mine simply to suppot the system make sense, but it still seems odd to see a large jump in those people in such a short period of time. Well good for you guys, it's nice to see people supporting a cause at their own loss.

I want to mine NMC asap as it appears to be quite profitable for me.I need someone who can tell me the nmc pool to join and how to setup in GUIMiner without requiring me to buy a domain name first.

I need to know.

You want to mine namecoin to buy a domain? Or to sell? It is more profitable to mine bitcoins if you are looking to cash out currently, otherwise if you want to set up a .bit domain then mining isn't a bad idea.

Again, I stated above more or less the best resource I've found for information about namecoin, dot-bit.org

The largest and oldest pool that also combines with a namecoin exchange is bitparking.com, it also has instructions on how to set up your mining clients.

I might try namecoin out with one of my cards that isnt as useful for mining bitcoins... maybe my gtx 570s

 ???

This is where I get confused. For what purpose? namecoin is only a slightly modified bitcoin setup. It exchanges for less bitcoin currently, so regardless of what you use to mine it, you will be taking a loss.

Maybe their logic is that, since NMC is easier to mine and provided the value goes up over long term, they'll make more BTC. That's risky though...

At the moment namecoin miners (whose number appears to be increasing ?!?) are donating 55882.45237847/1564057.45=.03573, with .03573/.0275=1.3.  In other words, they're donating 30% of their computing power to bitcoing miners.  It's amazing.  The worse their payback, the more miners pile on namecoin to lose money...

It's like running 3 5830s in your rig, but with one pointed at the test pool.

The mind just boggles.  Now, I can definitely see getting namecoin compiled and ready to go by the 12th (which is when it looks like block 16128 rolls around and we all need to be ready to pile on namecoin, but still.  It makes negative sense to mine NMC now.  I guess I should thank them for their donations though...

Now, when the new difficulty does happen I fully expect the NMC network computing power to increase not just by a factor of 10 like last time, but more likely by a factor of 100 if not 1000.  We should have all 2016 blocks mined out in well under 24 hours.  Good thing the chumps are willing and able to pick up the slack during the month+ long "subsidize" time to make several hour "profit" time that much better.

There's not enough computing resources available to make it 100x the current rate.

At current difficulty, no.  If difficulty falls to 1/4 the current level (like it was when we last dogpiled on), yes.  Ok, the 1000 was a bit of hyperbole, but if all BTC miners switch for a day at 15k difficulty we could mine out all 2016 blocks in around 24 hours.  Leaving namecoin with a 1.5 million difficulty, and several years of massively subsidized mining at a rate of a block per week until it adjusts back.

In reality something short of that will happen.

Come to think of it, if the US government wanted to kill bitcoin today that'd be the way to do it.  Ask the NSA to switch their cracking lab to mining for a few hours over a weekend, rack the difficulty up to say 20-30 million and bitcoin is history.  The fact that it hasn't been done proves to me that the US gov't, at least, is utterly unconcerned with bitcoin.

I don't think the NSA has enough money for that or GPUs currently available. The difficulty can also only increase 4x per increment.

+1

It's gonna be a far bigger rush than the June one. That difficulty will shoot up over the days that follow the decrease.

The hashing power on NMC is dropping again (people seeing sense), thus resulting in the next difficulty adjustment being pushed back... currently forecasted for the 15th, with a 50% decrease.

Because when the bitcoin difficulty stays stagnant... and the namecoin difficulty jumps (which it inevitably will once more people get tired of mining 2 million difficulty bitcoins.. for some at least). You can make a large profit in between.

Because namecoin prices seem to be determined by their difficulty to mine them as opposed to bitcoin.

Summary:  Who is mining Namecoins?

Those who don't care about exchange prices:

• People who want the coins for short-term use, to pay for registering and updating names, and/or purchasing products/services.
• People who want to support the Namecoin project for the long-term
• People who just heard about Namecoin and are testing it out

Those who care about exchange prices:

• People who seek short-term profit.  When they calculate the time is "right", they mine NMC in order to trade it into BTC, and then into a fiat currency.
• People who seek a long term investment.  They mine NMC and hold for the long-term.

I just like Namecoins and I can hit an icon on my desktop to mine them. I don't feel like mining Bitcoins and taking the trouble to exchange them, is that so bad? I could also work to make more money in USD and use that to buy Namecoins, but I'd rather just mine them.

I agree with your principle but not the actual numbers. At a difficulty of 26,000 it would take ~42 seconds per block and ~2650GH/s (total network hash rate) to make the 24hour mark. But that would amount to 26,000 x 14 = 364,000 difficulty and NOT 1.5 million. Once again I think you exaggerated a bit on your calculations. But I must agree with all of you, once the difficulty of NMC adjusts downward by 50% watch some fireworks take place.

It'll be interesting to see what effect the upcoming bitcoin/namecoin cross mining changes (http://dot-bit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=217) will have on price and difficulty.

Since when was there a limit on the increase per difficulty adjustment? I thought it was proportional to the time allotted of 2 weeks, 6 blocks per hour...

Indeed...

The highest hashing rate I have seen on your pool Chris was about 300Gh/s. What on your end does it show is the highest your pool has been at?

About 305Gh/s. It's about 1/5th of that now.

You ready with the proper server equipment to handle the rush? I suspect you will see >1000 GH/s this time around on your pool alone. But I could be wrong, I'm just going on the potential GH/s we have out there already and assuming that less than 1/10th of it comes to NMC even for a few days.

Your thoughts?

It's been running on a dedicated server for a while now, and handled 250+ fine when I switched to it from the old VPS I was using before. I don't think we'll see 300+ again personally. I think the namecoin/bitcoin price ratio will adjust much faster than in previous times when few knew about it.

Just look at the previous nmc difficulty increases; one was going to be something like 5-6x but in the end it was 4x exactly due to the limit.

Since it was put in the source code at the beginning of time?

Honestly I was just asking. You don't have to be a jack-wagon.

I think there will be a rush on namecoin but not as big as we might think.
After all, namecoin isn't accepted that much yet.
probably some of the miners will stay a bit longer on namecoin, which
would plane the diffculty.

people will jump to and fro based on profitability, i'm sure there is some people that will just stick with it, but its just common sense to go where the money is.

I don't have to be anything, I just am, I'm a guy with a computer.

You forgot attitude on your list.

I guess I was right. I seen your pool go up to 330 GH/s during the last difficulty change.

Wow, who knew Namecoin had been around for so long? Well probably a lot of you.

I just thought I'd dig up this random thread from almost 3 years ago.

Namecoin continues to suffer similar problems but sits steadfastly at #8 market cap of $20.7 mil... Not too shabby.

namecoin and .bit domains are really dead

I am mining Namecoins