BTC/NMC merged mining available for testing - page 2.

DavinciJ15

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Bitcoin - helping to end bankster enslavement.

The developers of NameCoin can do what the want to do.

I am saying that first because you will not hear it when I say what I have to say.

This is not a good idea. Why?

1. NameCoin's difficulty will increase with out the market deciding if it's a good idea or not.
2. Perception is EVERYTHING and although it's not true that namecoin will cause inflation to bitcoin that's how it will be perceived.

On a personal note I like getting lots of namecoins with me 12 Ghashs I don't want to share with deepbit's 4 THashs!!!
LOL Cheesy

Just my 2 bit cents.

Davinci

BTW I think the fact that namecoin is only traded with bitcoins helps bitcoins increase in value as there is 1 thing on the market that can only be purchased with bitcoins.

marcus_of_augustus

legendary

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Eadem mutata resurgo

Quote

Add in more currencies and the cap will go up even more, leading to an inflationary currency instead of a deflationary one that many were hoping for.

I'm not sure anyone ever said it would be deflationary except for the scaremongers defending the status quo.

It will most likely be a free market of competing currencies, unless there are draconian authoritarian interventions.

Multi-variate, price:supply:demand.

jollyjim

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Quote from: drawoc on July 21, 2011, 04:40:28 PM

Just because 50 NMC took just as much to mine as 50 BTC doesn't mean that anyone's willing to spend 50 BTC on 50 NMC (one domain name) - that's a ridiculous price for one domain name (and nobody uses NMC to buy anything other than domain names at this point). If you have one NMC you're going to have to sell them for a lot less than one BTC, if anyone is going to buy them from you.

There is no reason to believe that 1 NMC will be equal to 1 BTC due to the perceived value of the two. However, since both are mined at the same time, there's reason to believe that the exchange rate for both will become mostly fixed to say 10 NMC per 1 BTC, which essentially means the 21m coins cap for BTC has just gone up 10%. If 1 BTC were considered a dollar, an NMC could be considered a dime. Add in more currencies and the cap will go up even more, leading to an inflationary currency instead of a deflationary one that many were hoping for.

drawoc

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Quote from: imperi on July 21, 2011, 04:59:43 PM

Registering a domain costs 12 NMC now, and at the next difficulty it will be 11.2. Get educated, go to school, stay off drugs.

And at block 24000 when this is (hopefully) implemented, it'll be 6.69 NC per domain, which is still too high for the exchange rate to get to 1 btc per nc.

imperi

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Quote from: drawoc on July 21, 2011, 04:40:28 PM

Quote from: Xephan on July 21, 2011, 01:54:03 PM

I read this previously but didn't think it made sense. After a second reading, I think I'm seeing how it might decouple the value of NC to BC but it's still not crystal clear why people won't start equating NC to BC since the cost to produce becomes identical.

If I grew corn in gold plated soil, it would cost millions of dollars to produce an ear of corn. That doesn't mean that anyone's going to spend millions to buy my ear of corn.

Just because 50 NMC took just as much to mine as 50 BTC doesn't mean that anyone's willing to spend 50 BTC on 50 NMC (one domain name) - that's a ridiculous price for one domain name (and nobody uses NMC to buy anything other than domain names at this point). If you have one NMC you're going to have to sell them for a lot less than one BTC, if anyone is going to buy them from you.

Registering a domain costs 12 NMC now, and at the next difficulty it will be 11.2. Get educated, go to school, stay off drugs.

drawoc

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Quote from: Xephan on July 21, 2011, 01:54:03 PM

I read this previously but didn't think it made sense. After a second reading, I think I'm seeing how it might decouple the value of NC to BC but it's still not crystal clear why people won't start equating NC to BC since the cost to produce becomes identical.

If I grew corn in gold plated soil, it would cost millions of dollars to produce an ear of corn. That doesn't mean that anyone's going to spend millions to buy my ear of corn.

Just because 50 NMC took just as much to mine as 50 BTC doesn't mean that anyone's willing to spend 50 BTC on 50 NMC (one domain name) - that's a ridiculous price for one domain name (and nobody uses NMC to buy anything other than domain names at this point). If you have one NMC you're going to have to sell them for a lot less than one BTC, if anyone is going to buy them from you.

Xephan

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Quote from: drawoc on July 18, 2011, 08:27:06 PM

When I can mine both BTC and NMC at once, the linkedness falls apart completely. Suddenly, if I want BTC, it's best I mine both and exchane the NMC. If I want NMC, it's best I mine both and exchange the BTC.

So now everyone's mining both, so the difficulty becomes equal, and since the miners no longer look at the difficulty and exchange rate of both, and they are no longer linked by difficulty, only by how many people want BTC and how many want NMC.

I read this previously but didn't think it made sense. After a second reading, I think I'm seeing how it might decouple the value of NC to BC but it's still not crystal clear why people won't start equating NC to BC since the cost to produce becomes identical.

drawoc

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Quote from: Xephan on July 21, 2011, 08:12:48 AM

But eventually they will start going in step with each other won't they?

Let's say it's now 80 NC to 1 BC.
Once merged, the amount of hash available to NC would cause a short term spike and many people might hop onto NC mining because of the faster gain. Then difficulty corrects. It would become harder to mine NC, so the exchange would adjust, say to 40NC to 1BC. This would continue until an equilibrium of 1 NC to 1 BC is reached wouldn't it? Or effectively creating 2x the Bitcoin supply as some already mentioned.

Their value wouldn't be equal, but difficulty would. I already posted an argument to this, which everyone seemed to ignore:
https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=29074.msg377675#msg377675

Xephan

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Quote from: Mike Hearn on July 21, 2011, 06:57:15 AM

Difficulty calculations on NameCoin remain the same as before. The only difference is now there'll likely be more hash power put into the chain because you don't have to choose between namecoin and bitcoin, you can do both. The difficulties are not tied together.

But eventually they will start going in step with each other won't they?

Let's say it's now 80 NC to 1 BC.
Once merged, the amount of hash available to NC would cause a short term spike and many people might hop onto NC mining because of the faster gain. Then difficulty corrects. It would become harder to mine NC, so the exchange would adjust, say to 40NC to 1BC. This would continue until an equilibrium of 1 NC to 1 BC is reached wouldn't it? Or effectively creating 2x the Bitcoin supply as some already mentioned.

marcus_of_augustus

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Eadem mutata resurgo

Quote

The difficulties are not tied together.

But the economic incentives are such that they soon will be ...

Mike Hearn

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You need a new Bitcoin if you want to partake in merged mining. You don't need a new one if you don't care about merged mining - older Bitcoin servers will just ignore the extra 33 bytes.

The 33 bytes are a sha256 hash (32 bytes) and one byte for the length, so, 33. The hash is the root of a merkle tree. As there is only one item in that tree today, it's equivalent to a hash of some data that ties the current namecoin block to the tree root.

You can read the details on the wiki page I posted earlier. It's a complicated technique because Bitcoin wasn't really designed for it, so it must be done in a rather roundabout manner.

Difficulty calculations on NameCoin remain the same as before. The only difference is now there'll likely be more hash power put into the chain because you don't have to choose between namecoin and bitcoin, you can do both. The difficulties are not tied together.

foo

sr. member

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Quote from: Mike Hearn on July 20, 2011, 05:11:25 AM

Yes, coblee is right. The 33 bytes goes into the Bitcoin block chain.

Could someone please explain exactly what the change is? What is in these 33 bytes? Will Namecoin's hashes no longer need to have the required number of starting zeroes, as long the block has some kind of Bitcoin proof-of-work? What exactly is this proof-of-work? How does it relate to these mysterious 33 bytes? How is the different difficulty on the chains dealt with? (Namecoin produces blocks faster than Bitcoin.)
Huh

TeraPool

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Quote from: Mike Hearn on July 20, 2011, 05:11:25 AM

Yes, coblee is right. The 33 bytes goes into the Bitcoin block chain.

Ermmm.. so do we have to convince the entire bitcoin community to partake in this as well then?

From here: http://dot-bit.org/MergedMining

Quote

Do I need to upgrade my bitcoin?

No. The patches are only relevant for pool operators. However it might be possible that the patch gets included into an upcoming bitcoin release.

Mike Hearn

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Yes, coblee is right. The 33 bytes goes into the Bitcoin block chain.

xen82

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This merged mining daemon looks very interesting. Are there any tutorials out there on how to get started? Would it be enough to simply compile the source from: https://github.com/vinced/namecoin/tree/namecoind-mergedmine and run that as the namecoin client, run an up to date bitcoin client and point my miners at the merged miner proxy (which in turn would point to the locally running namecoind and bitcoind)?

Wouldn't it be possible to use to parent chain interface to a mining pool such as deepbit or btcguild?

I'm looking forward in seeing how this evolves...

Cheers:)

coblee

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Creator of Litecoin. Cryptocurrency enthusiast.

Quote from: TeraPool on July 20, 2011, 02:19:00 AM

I believe mike was referring to the namecoin blockchain as having to deal with the 33 extra bytes...

There is no way on earth we are going to convince half of the bitcoin nodes to upgrade to help out the namecoin network... if I am wrong on this please correct me but I don't see how I could be.

You don't need to make bitcoin users download a new client. The 33 extra bytes is just the extra nonce stored in the coinbase. Current bitcoin clients will accept new blocks with whatever in the coinbase... they don't care that much. So there's no need to update bitcoin client. But the new namecoin client will check the coinbase in the bitcoin block to validate its blocks. At least that's what I understand.

TeraPool

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Quote from: coblee on July 19, 2011, 01:54:08 PM

Quote from: TeraPool on July 19, 2011, 01:25:02 PM

Quote from: Mike Hearn on July 19, 2011, 05:06:06 AM

TeraPool is correct. Merged mining does not pollute the Bitcoin block chain with Namecoin data. The only addition to the chain is a single hash in the coinbase transaction - ie, an additional 33 bytes per block. It isn't significant. This is the whole point of having split chains that share work.

And just to re-iterate.

That "addition to the chain" is only in the namecoin blockchain.

Bitcoiners will be none the wiser unless they switch to a pool that is helping them mine namecoins as well. In which case the bitcoin blockchain is still completely unaffected.

That's wrong. 33 bytes are added to the bitcoin blockchain. As Mike Hearn said, it's not significant. So I agree, it's not really polluting the bitcoin blockchain. But I'm still uneasy about what the consequences to namecoin would be if you tie the generation of namecoin and bitcoin together.

I believe mike was referring to the namecoin blockchain as having to deal with the 33 extra bytes...

There is no way on earth we are going to convince half of the bitcoin nodes to upgrade to help out the namecoin network... if I am wrong on this please correct me but I don't see how I could be.

coblee

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Creator of Litecoin. Cryptocurrency enthusiast.

Quote from: TeraPool on July 19, 2011, 01:25:02 PM

Quote from: Mike Hearn on July 19, 2011, 05:06:06 AM

TeraPool is correct. Merged mining does not pollute the Bitcoin block chain with Namecoin data. The only addition to the chain is a single hash in the coinbase transaction - ie, an additional 33 bytes per block. It isn't significant. This is the whole point of having split chains that share work.

And just to re-iterate.

That "addition to the chain" is only in the namecoin blockchain.

Bitcoiners will be none the wiser unless they switch to a pool that is helping them mine namecoins as well. In which case the bitcoin blockchain is still completely unaffected.

That's wrong. 33 bytes are added to the bitcoin blockchain. As Mike Hearn said, it's not significant. So I agree, it's not really polluting the bitcoin blockchain. But I'm still uneasy about what the consequences to namecoin would be if you tie the generation of namecoin and bitcoin together.

TeraPool

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Quote from: Mike Hearn on July 19, 2011, 05:06:06 AM

TeraPool is correct. Merged mining does not pollute the Bitcoin block chain with Namecoin data. The only addition to the chain is a single hash in the coinbase transaction - ie, an additional 33 bytes per block. It isn't significant. This is the whole point of having split chains that share work.

And just to re-iterate.

That "addition to the chain" is only in the namecoin blockchain.

Bitcoiners will be none the wiser unless they switch to a pool that is helping them mine namecoins as well. In which case the bitcoin blockchain is still completely unaffected.

Mike Hearn

legendary

Activity: 1526

Merit: 1134

TeraPool is correct. Merged mining does not pollute the Bitcoin block chain with Namecoin data. The only addition to the chain is a single hash in the coinbase transaction - ie, an additional 33 bytes per block. It isn't significant. This is the whole point of having split chains that share work.

Topic: BTC/NMC merged mining available for testing - page 2. (Read 25540 times)