#namecoin on irc.freenode.net has an active community if you want to discuss namecoin things.

You can exchange namecoins with sellers in forum threads around here, sellers on the dot-bit.org site, or the namecoin exchange. Whether it's profitable or not vs bitcoins depends on the difficulties of the two chains and the price you get for them. I'll leave that up to you to calculate. You can read more about what they are here.

Um, 0.008 is in bitcoins, that 3.80 is the value in bitcoins. So multiply that by the USD rate. I probably shouldn't mention that mining namecoins is good at the moment since it'll drive the price down, but the namecoin network does need more miners.

bitcoin difficulty = 567358.22457067
namecoin difficulty = 2815.22139486

ratio =  2815.22139486/567358.22457067
         = 0.004961982
Current price 1 namecoin = 0.0067 BTC

How is mining namecoins 19 times less income than mining bitcoins? 

I don't think you can, with an unpatched bitcoind, get notified of a new block, or get a list of all transactions in a block. I'm just explaining why some sites have gone for the 'one shot' deposit option. It's easy to implement. There are other ways of doing it. For example every 10 minutes looking at 'listtransactions' for an address in the deposit list. For my site I'm still exploring the best ways of doing this. Lucky I don't have many users Yeah I plan to switch to UTC. I thought the server was UTC already but forgot I'd set it up with NZ time.

Lowest trades are about 0.006 bitcoins per namecoin. What does the difficulty suggest they should be trading at?

Please don't advertise it as "The new better MtGox". That implies it's MtGox operating using new software or something. Maybe "The new better alternative to MtGox" or something.

There are quite a few people on the namecoin network mining so I'm guessing that people are doing this. Current difficulty is 2815.22139486.

Because without patching bitcoind it's a pain. You have to constantly poll the addresses to see if any deposits have gone in. Multiply this by 10,000 users and it's not scalable. So by giving a 'one shot' address you can scan only this address, and expire it after a couple of days.

Why does the Trade Hill FAQ mention BitcoinExchange Services (an exchange at bitcoinexchange.cc) as if it was them?

Did Trade Hill copy parts of their FAQ or are they the same?

I recently rewrote the pool software to handle more load. You can still withdraw from the old pool account and I'll automatically withdraw the remaining amounts next week to those that haven't withdrawn. The new pool is operating at the same URL and port. Withdrawals from the old pool are available at http://oldpool.bitparking.com/pool. If you have any questions let me know.

The .bit sites need to add a vhost entry for theirsite.namecoin.us. Some of them have done this, but yes, it's a pain.

Yes. So namecoin difficulty is currently 2815.22139486. Bitcoin is 434882.72174970. So based on diffculty 1 namecoin is worth 0.00647 bitcoins. Namecoins do have intrinsic value in that they can be used to purchase namecoin domains so that may affect the price somewhat. The high on the exchange is 0.009 and the low is 0.006 at the time of writing this.

The OpenID stuff is definitely a bit of a pain at the moment. I'm trying to track down the issues. Part of the motivation for writing the exchange was to stress test the implementation of the language/framework I used to build it. It's done a good job of that in parts. I've tweaked the OpenID a bit again and would be interested if anyone see's the 'Signature didn't match' again (may require deleting existing browser cookies for the exchange site).

There is an exchange operating at https://exchange.bitparking.com if you want to try buying there.

I've done this and recovered the coins. If you've sent namecoins to a bitcoin address you can fix it by having the owner of the bitcoin address doing this:

1. Stop bitcoind and namecoind
2. Backup the namecoin wallet.dat somewhere
3. Copy the bitcoin wallet.dat into the ~/.namecoin directory, overwiting the existing wallet.dat (make sure you did step 2)
4. start namecoind with: namecoind -rescan
5. Assuming you have the full namecoin blockchain you'll see the coins in the balance. You can then 'sendtoaddress' to a real namecoin address
6. stop namecoind
7. copy your namecoin wallet.dat backup back into ~/.namecoin
8. start namecoind with: namecoind -rescan

If you've sent bitcoin addresses to a namecoin address follow the same steps, swapping namecoin and bitcoin around. Note that it's the recipient of the original send, the owner of the address, that must do these steps. It's probably even better to do all this in a virtual machine with clean wallets so you don't accidentally overwrite your own wallet.

See if this post helps. Also try dot-bit.org.

Can you try signing up again? The lack of accepting the cookie in the first place may have prevented it from going through. I don't see a record from that openid url.

See this post on namecoins for details.

That's what I hear about bitcoin too.  Funny how people resist new ideas.