I'm still failing to see the essential root of the anger and feeling of unfairness that people have about a pool operator secretly mining and keeping namecoins.  Why am I in such a minority here?

Do people somehow feel that the hashes they create are their own intellectual property!?  Do you feel that by submitting a share to a pool that you are only licensing them to use that share for a certain purpose and that them using that share for any other unadvertised purpose is unethical?  How can one think that they have a right to expect that, especially without specifically getting the pool operator to agree to such terms.  There is nothing artistic which is added so certainly copyright cannot apply.

It's hard to find a perfect analogy but this is pretty close:

Let us suppose that the PrimeGrid (distributed CPU large prime finding project) starts paying users bitcoins for their CPU time.  The deal is that a sufficiently large prime is worth 200 BTC to be shared between the contributers.

The people running the project publish all of the primes that they find.

The people running the project secretly use some of the primes found in their encryption software which they sell for dollars.

Would most of you be angry at the the project owners for this because they didn't advertise that they were using your CPU power for some personal gain?  Would you feel entitled to your share of those dollars despite the fact that no such deal was ever made?  If you found a particularly large prime would you feel that you owned it and should be able to collect a royalty on its use?

Interesting, it seems that

http://allchains.info/
and
http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

are suggesting very different future values for Namecoin difficulty.  In this case it seems that allchains is wrong.

Trying to find something of the calculation I found this page https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty which confirms my expectations:


I can't be truly sure without looking at the code but this is enough for me to be reasonably confident that we are indeed headed for a massive drop in Namecoin difficulty.

Does anyone know how a new difficulty is calculated?  Is it simply based on the length of time taken to find the last 2016 blocks?  If so we should expect the Namecoin difficulty to fall sharply very soon which will give a temporary huge boost to merged mining (possibly over 100%).

I got in at 1 am from a long day to find that the power had been tripped and my miner was off.

I was far more dismayed to later find that the simplecoin servers had suffered an even longer outage!  We've had a full month of practically perfect uptime and this serious downtime couldn't have come at a worse time!

Man!  And luck at the pool has been utterly rotten.  I don't know if the bad luck or the outage was most to blame for the reduced hashrates but I was really hoping to see this pool touching 100 GH/s total by this time today and instead we're barely holding over 40 GH/s.

*sigh*

Thanks to all of you miners that are sticking with this pool through this tough time.  I'm really hoping that the pool has some good luck over then next 24 hours and all of our shares can be converted into juicy coins.

Thanks mike for your hard work today.  The pool has evolved so much in the last 7 days.

Hmm... I think I agree that if one has to choose between considering only one blockchain or the other for hopping then one should choose the most profitable one.

However, further gains might be made by considering both together.  Consider for example the situation where you are hopping with the Bitcoin blocks as usual at a merged mining pool and you are about to hop away when suddenly a Namecoin block is found.  At this point the Bitcoin shares will be worth marginally less than average but the Namecoin shares will be worth a lot more.  Overall, staying with the proportional pool will be more profitable than mining with a PPLNS merged mining pool.  Indeed, it's possible that the Namecoin block shows up a short while after you hop away from the pool and it becomes profitable to rejoin the proportional pool for a short time.

I'm afraid all I know is that it is apparently quite a bit easier to do than setting up a merged mining pool.  There was a merged mining testnet running for a fair while before merged mining was officially rolled out for the main block chains.  Also, it is much easier to find information on Namecoin sites and forums than on Bitcoin ones.

I've not looked into it myself because I'm happy with pooled mining right now (simplecoin.us PPLNS for its decent promotions and server stability).  Good luck with your operation though.  I'm a fan of solo mining myself and only moved to pooled mining a month or so ago as PPLNS started to become popular.

Ah! I see.

One thing I've been wondering about this morning is pool hopping with merged mining.  Calculating when it is profitable to mine in a proportional pool taking into account the Bitcoin and Namecoin blocks is an interesting extension.  One could also try factoring in fees and promotions but I don't think this would be as much fun.

Certainly, pool hopping normal bitcoin pools does not compare with plain merged mining in terms of profit (currently about 40%).  Hopping the merged mining pools seems to be best.

For the proportional pool, slush is a good bet for the low variance.  There is a 2% fee but this is small compared to the fact that not everyone has entered a Namecoin address yet and slush had decided to share the pool's namecoins between only those users who have (so a good but decreasing NMC boost).

As for a pool to hop to, simplecoin.us PPLNS is the other option at the moment.  It is a fair bit larger and does have a significant promotion bonus (BTC+2%, NMC+10%) but the variance is probably too high for most people's taste so the lower profit SMPPS pool seems like a good choice.

The question I have, (which I asked at the CherryPicking thread) is how to most effectively hop a merged mining pool at all?  Does one simply hop by the Namecoin blocks and ignore the Bitcoin blocks or does one take them both into account in a clever way?

One question that comes to mind is how this software can be configured to hop merged mining proportional pools effectively.  I expect that both the Bitcoin and Namecoin blocks would have to be taken into account when working out whether or not to mine at the proportional pool but perhaps ignoring the Bitcoin blocks and using the Namecoin blocks directly would yield most of the profit.  Will this software work directly on a merged mining pool?

I'm also not aware of the approximate income bonus that one might expect from pool hopping but I doubt it competes to the current 40% bonus of merged mining so if one has to choose then merged mining will have priority.  It would be great to be able to stack these methods for a higher bonus (maybe 60 or 70%?).

The other problem is having a non proportional merged mining pool to hop to.  All I know of right now is simplecoin PPLNS (BTC+2%, NMC+10%), simplecoin SMPPS (BTC+2%), and solo merged mining but all of these have high variance.

After reading a thread about solo mining filled with anti-solo trolls this is a nice change.  I just wanted to stop and mention solo merged mining if you hadn't come across it.  It would take a little more setting up but your expected return would rise significantly.

Personally I like the idea of having a single wallet on one machine and pointing all the others to it.  Pooled mining software would only be required if you wanted each computer to get it's fair share but didn't want the higher variance of each computer solo mining (a rather strange desire in my mind).

Yeah.  I just checked again to see the PPLNS pool up 24.583 GH/s!  This is an average of one Namecoin block every 4 hours and 33 mins.  The proportional pool is doing even better!

Now that slush's pool offers merged mining people may head there for the low variance but simplecoin.us is still a little attractive since the proportional pool is (BTC + 2%, NMC) and the PPLNS pool is (BTC + 2%, NMC + 10%) whereas slush's (proportional) is (BTC - 2%, NMC - 2%).  Perhaps miners will considering splitting their resources between slush and simplecoin.us

It would at least be great to test out simplecoin's theoretical scalability.

Cool!

My idea was to try to distill the essential problem of the proportional reward system to the point where most people can quickly read it and see the problem as obviously as we do.  Unfortunately it has warped so much that I feel most people will see only a loose connection with the proportional reward system.

Dicecoin fills a big gap here.  You really do have something which closely reflects the proportional reward system but have neatly stripped away talking about hashes, shares, and difficulty (which just confuse the issue).  Unfortunately the game is quite a bit more complicated than mine but is certainly more accessible than the proportional reward system and likely will become more so with a little tidying up.  I like the idea of phrasing it as a problem but it very much reminds me of 1st year undergraduate probability questions .

Some thoughts:

Point (2) begins with "Each each".

I personally slightly prefer using a 6-sided dice for it's ubiquity and for shorter games but I see that 10 allows for simpler costs and rewards.  The "5" in $50 and $500 is just noise in my opinion and I'd be tempted to go with $10 and $100.

Perhaps some of the wording can be cleaned up to make the game quicker to understand.  I only suggest little things like replacing "goes" with "lasts" in "Example: A game goes for 20 throws."

Your rewards for solving these problems are generous.  I would instead promise to reward particularly elegant and well explained solutions as these have real value.  This is however my opinion as a maths tutor and I'm known for being harsh .

Best of luck with this.  Feel free to use my game on your blog as a simple thought experiment if you like.  There is no obligation of course, I merely wish to point out that it should be considered public domain information.

Following slush's official announcement of supporting merged mining the Namecoin market value has started to fall quickly (thus affecting the income bonus for all merged miners).  Right now it's still holding at around 40% and so is a very lucrative option.

Slush's pool is currently at around 1350 GH/s so there is finally a low variance option for merged miners (2% fee, proportional).  Very much worth considering for the server reliability and uptime which this pool can offer (I've seen reports of some problems with the smaller pools).

For maximum profit simplecoin.us still seems to be on top thanks to their 0% fee and promotions.  They also have a good reputation for server reliability, scalability, and uptime, and managed the switch to merged mining with no serious problems.  The only problem I see is the high variance although, unsurprisingly, it's falling fast.

Approximation:  Most hashes are useless.  Some hashes are particularly small (difficulty 1) and can become shares.  Some hashes are really small (difficulty 94'035.90) and such a hash can be used to generate a Namecoin block (the same hash will also become a share).  Some hashes are extremely small (difficulty 1'689'575.83) and such a hash can be used to generate Bitcoin blocks (the same hash will be used to generate a Namecoin block and will become a share).  Just as one typically sees 1.7 million times as many shares as Bitcoin blocks, so too will one see about 18 times as many Namecoin blocks as Bitcoin blocks.

They are worth much less but the difficulty is also much lower.  For every bitcoin you make with merged mining you will earn about 18 namecoins.  18 namecoins is worth almost half of a bitcoin at the current market rates.

Nice one!  The best I managed with my two 5850's was 732 MH/s pulling 302 W at the wall (only 2.44 MH/J to your 2.46MH/J).

These days my miner doubles as a Go bot so it's on 24/7 anyway.  If I decide to stop mining then all I will do is power down the cards (saving about 190 W) and so it's unlikely that they will become unprofitable to run, particularly with the current 45% income bonus of using merged mining.

Depending on how well namecoins hold their value people will be able to mine at lower market prices using merged mining.  Right now, merged mining gives a miner about 45% more income for the same power consumption (although few pools are using merged mining right now).


Agreed, those were some good posts.  Last year I was largely uncertain about Bitcoin's viability but following the huge bubble I'm fairly optimistic about Bitcoin's future.

Awesome!  I also noticed the promotions list on the stats page, nice work.

Lol yes, we're talking better than 60% more profitable than ordinary Bitcoin miners.  Don't forget to consider the significant promotions that the smaller pools are doing to try and get a large user base.

Hopping between the proportional and PPLNS pools at simplecoin.us seems to be the most profitable at the moment (the PPLNS pool essentially offers BTC+2% and NMC+10% and will do for quite some time).

Most of that is slush and he fully intends to pass those namecoins out to the miners.  Currently the merged mining is just testing.  I'm sure slush has taken appropriate steps to ensure that the pool users are not being affected by this testing.