Namecoin Mining Pool

[smoothie]

I just wanted to see how many people have even thought about mining namecoins.

The current difficulty is 55880 (up 3.5 times the last difficulty of 15000).

Currently it is not profitable to mine at this difficulty. It appears that the difficulty based on the 2016 block set for this difficulty period will not be met in the average period of 6 blocks per hour.

Blocks were being generated at like 10 to 15 an hour at difficulty 15000 now because it isn't profitable the blocks per hour have slowed to like 1.5 to maybe 2 per hour.

I will likely start a namecoin mining pool soon. Hopefully by then the difficulty has come down to a more reasonable level.

Anyone interested in joining once I start? Might not be for a couple of weeks though.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and input.

[gurcani]

I been minin 'em.

And nobody else seems to be, because the block I found is having hard time getting confirmations. I would be against a pool myself. In fact that is the only reason I am mining namecoins now, because I can still mine 'em solo. Whereas bitcoins are out of reach now for a solo miner with a few GH/s mining power.

right now if you mine them and sell directly for BTC, you make slightly less BTC, if you have instead mined btc in a pool or something. However currently If you are a bit patient with the exchange you can easily make slightly more though, because it is pretty close.

People are saying it will be worse, since the exchange rate seems to follow difficulty ratio and that will became worse soon.

[smoothie]

Google "namecoin exchange" and look at the current rates. Once the rates go above a certain level (ratio of difficulty of the two networks) then you will actually be more profitable mining namecoins and trading them for bitcoins. Another plus about mining namecoins is the granularity of mining without fees from a pool.

Give it a few weeks and watch the to markets.

[gurcani]

Once the rates go above a certain level (ratio of difficulty of the two networks) then you will actually be more profitable mining namecoins and trading them for bitcoins.

The claim (I'm not sure I buy it) is that the exchange rate roughly follows the difficulty ratio (because it is the miners that determine the price of namecoins, whereas the bitcoins are sold by both miners and investers). If this is the case, it will actually be worse, because the bitcoin diff will increase, the namecoin diff will decrease (and quite a bit probably). So there will be a lot of namecoins generation.

I don't really understand why though. To me all the little miners should switch to namecoin now and its difficulty should increase. But they don't apparently. Because the whole day there were something like 13 blocks found by the whole network.

But anyways, you can mine some and just keep them for future. Who knows, maybe one day they will be valuable?

[smoothie]

Two weeks ago the ratio of difficulty was:

15000 / 877227 = 0.017099

And the exchange rate hit 0.14 as the high and average in the 0.06 to 0.08 range. That is a huge multiplication of value.

Like I said a few weeks back I was mining namecoins at 15000 difficulty and selling them for 2.5 times the amount of bitcoins I could get by pool mining.
 

But don't take my advice/word for it, look and see for yourself.

Hope this helps you.

[Grinder]

I don't really understand why though. To me all the little miners should switch to namecoin now and its difficulty should increase.

Why would they do that when they can mine bitcoins and use them to buy more namecoins for the reward than they would get by mining namecoins directly?

[Manko]

Two weeks ago the ratio of difficulty was:

15000 / 877227 = 0.017099

And the exchange rate hit 0.14 as the high and average in the 0.06 to 0.08 range. That is a huge multiplication of value.

Like I said a few weeks back I was mining namecoins at 15000 difficulty and selling them for 2.5 times the amount of bitcoins I could get by pool mining.
 

But don't take my advice/word for it, look and see for yourself.

Hope this helps you.

I was there, and it was sweet

Up until I discovered NMC I wasn't sure if I'd get my money back on my mining kit, then I ran across a thread about it (1 and a half weeks before the NMC rush). Done a load of research for about a week, then switched my miners over to see how they did. Then some days later others stated to join, and the price of NMC went from 0.006 BTC to 0.09 !!!!!! and I sold, mined, sold, mined.... lovely

It didn't last long, but it lasted long enough for me to make my money back and actually be over $1k up

Now, the forecasted difficulty is plummeting... curently a 67% decrease on the 30th of July

The price has been fluctuating between 0.02 and 0.03, which with the current difficulty, is not more profitable than mining BTC... at least not for the miners who like to mine then sell ASAP.

I have my miners ready to jump ship just as soon as NMC mining is more profitable

[talpan]

Two weeks ago the ratio of difficulty was:

15000 / 877227 = 0.017099

And the exchange rate hit 0.14 as the high and average in the 0.06 to 0.08 range. That is a huge multiplication of value.

Like I said a few weeks back I was mining namecoins at 15000 difficulty and selling them for 2.5 times the amount of bitcoins I could get by pool mining.
 

But don't take my advice/word for it, look and see for yourself.

Hope this helps you.

I was there, and it was sweet

Up until I discovered NMC I wasn't sure if I'd get my money back on my mining kit, then I ran across a thread about it (1 and a half weeks before the NMC rush). Done a load of research for about a week, then switched my miners over to see how they did. Then some days later others stated to join, and the price of NMC went from 0.006 BTC to 0.09 !!!!!! and I sold, mined, sold, mined.... lovely

It didn't last long, but it lasted long enough for me to make my money back and actually be over $1k up

Now, the forecasted difficulty is plummeting... curently a 67% decrease on the 30th of July

The price has been fluctuating between 0.02 and 0.03, which with the current difficulty, is not more profitable than mining BTC... at least not for the miners who like to mine then sell ASAP.

I have my miners ready to jump ship just as soon as NMC mining is more profitable

as it seems the difficulty will go down by 50% http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php