Pero por lo que dicen en el Pool de slush, hace operaciones diferentes a las de Bitcoin, y se puede minar las dos cosas a la vez aun sin perder ningún rendimiento en los mhash de bitcoin. Por lo que a la teoría, consumes lo mismo, generas los mismos bitcoins y a la vez namecoins que quien sabe hacia donde irán.
Copio un extracto del slush pool:
How it is possible to mine together Bitcoins and Namecoins?
Mining involves a finding a solution for some hash. The hashed data contains: a coinbase (bytes that uniquely identify coins mined in current block, and usually is just a random string) and a merkle root (bytes that contain a history of all transactions). This data is mixed together to form a 'midstate' which is the input data for hashing algorithm. NMC mining is merged with BTC mining by taking the NMC 'midstate' and using it as coinbase for BTC. From BTC point of view the coinbase is still a random string, but from NMC point of view it's the data that - once BTC is solved - will confirm an NMC block. The point here is that NMC usually has lower difficulty, so NMC blocks are solved more frequently with the same shares submitted than BTC blocks.
This basically means that NMC can be mined "for free" while mining BTC. The pool will mine NMC with full power, and mined NMC will be divided between users who filled in a valid NMC wallet.
