Mark drew my attention to this post on /r/Doge
https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/3na85t/how_you_see_the_future_for_dogecoinwhere the discuss Uno and its relatively low hashrate compared to Bitcoin.
I think we hashed this out as a community before implementing merged mining. The point being made seems to be that somehow, Uno is now more vulnerable because of merge mining. Someone can now attack Uno without losing the opportunity cost of mining Bitcoin.
In consideration, I do believe it is better for UNO now that there is a threshold. You must now be "this tall" to attack the Uno network. Not long ago, it would have been possible to take over our network with just 30ths of hash. I know guys who can do that out of their garage. Many, many individual miners could put up that kind of hash and the hash is getting cheaper by the day. Assuming our network consists of 1 phs of honest miners (which on a good day it does), and now a bad miner wanted to take over the network, he would need to muscle in by putting around 1.1phs of his own hash to capture more than 50% of the power. Yes, there are individual pools that could do that. But if it is currently not worth the effort for some miners to start merge mining Uno, why would it be worth the effort to attack Uno?
This is all hypothetical, and of course on a bad day there are pools on the Bitcoin network that can (and have in the past) capture 51% of that network. It's always a concern for any coin. When Uno becomes more valuable, the miners will undoubtedly add Uno. But our present hash rate is MUCH more secure than it has been, and it appears well distributed. We're much stronger than low hash coins like Zeta, who are more susceptible to interference from a much larger overall pool of small actors.
As has always been the case, the best way to get people interested in mining Uno is to pay them. In the "old days," pre-MM, you could easy raise the hashrate of Uno by simply buying up the price of Uno on Cryptsy; hash would automatically switch over to mining Uno thanks to profitability algos over at Coinwarz and others. We would see dramatic spikes and declines in hash and difficulty. Since merge mining with Bitcoin, hash is fairly steady in the 1phs range.
That said, I WOULD love it if we as a community could continue to reach out to new bitcoin miners. Though I am grateful for our present hash, and it's a huge improvement over what we had, the uptake has been comparatively low to the overall Bitcoin network I would love to see Uno double (or more) its hash. I was invited by Slush's Pool to contact them again in Nov, which I will do. They had recently implemented MM, and they wanted to gain more experience with it. I'll certainly make the case. But meanwhile, if you are a miner and have any pull or contacts with the large pools that do MM, please get in touch with me.
Also remember that there is another halving coming up in December. Now would be the most opportune time to reach out again to pools. This work only gets harder as the reward halves.
