Merged mining is only a few blocks away now and from what I can see the bitcoin side of the equation is grossly underprepared. I hope I'm wrong but I don't think this is going to go well. The problem as I see it is that the merged mining community has prepared itself but not given the bitcoin community the tools it needs to adapt. Let me explain.
The thing is, it is not like it has come out of the blue, it has taken many months to get here. People had been complaining about how long it has taken to get here. The bitcoin community does not need to be prepared. They can just continue to ignore it if they want to.
Documentation is woefully lacking. Basically limited to a wiki page a some scattered discussion threads on the namecoin forum. Miners don't need to do anything but bitcoin pools that wish to adopt merged mining need to implement the spec one way or another. Currently the only way to do this is to use vinced's patched bitcoind and namecoind along with the python merged-mining-proxy. This proxy has to sit between the poolserver (e.g. pushpool, poolserverj or custom) and the bitcoind. This represents both a potential bottleneck and an extra point of failure and to my knowledge has never been tested on a load greater than about 50GH. The alternative is for pools to implement the merged mining spec themselves. This is easier said than done. The spec is NOT documented anywhere.
Yep, lack of a single place to find most information and much of anything to read that is not code is a real pain.
Vinced's patched *coind stuff is not the only way to do this. sacarlson's multicoin-exp has supported merged mining since June now, and he used to post hoping to get others helping to learn and test things out with it. He has even set up a number of test chains for merged mining. Almost no one joined in. People have chosen mostly to ignore mm.
I do agree the documentation should be a lot better. It is very fragile it seems, and you do need to read code to tweek it at all. The thing is though it is an OSS project, and they need to do things to get people involved as they are always short man power. I am tearing my hair out trying to figure out why merged mining works with these two chains, but fails when I add this third chain, but not another third chain etc.. I really wish it was easier to set up. It is not going to get to be so though with the current man power on it.
Status: Ready for testing. Implemented using python.
Ready for testing.. but then how many actually have help them with the testing?
So the bottom line is that every pool that wants to adopt merged mining currently has no choice but the use the untested merged-mining-proxy black box. So the MM spec is not documented and frankly I think it's grossly irresponsible of the people pushing MM to have let it get this far without doing so well in advance of the cutover block. Without hours/days of poring over the code (in 2 different languages) it's essentially a black box. The provided solution creates a number of problems and the sensible thing to do would be for pools to simply refuse to touch it until that situation is addressed.
Unfortunately merged mining has created a situation where adopting the change is very difficult to resist. Once one pool adopts it, it puts enormous pressure on the others to follow as the miners will flock to the pool that offers free extra Xcoins for the same mining effort. End result is we have a mass of pools struggling to cope with new xcoind patches and an unproven python point of potential failure/bottleneck and no one available to support it except the merged mining developers who seem to be online for about 10 mins/week.
Yep, that's it... once it is active, people will take an interest finally, and help developed the needed infrastructure if they want it. Since pools will probably need it to stay competitive they will probably be a major source of the manpower or bounties to finally get what is needed done after all these months.
If there are problems and 1/2 pools roll back it still doesn't create any incentive for the MM crowd to step up and do the job properly because their motive is increase hash power on the NMC network and they will have acheived that whatever the consequences to bitcoin mining might be...
IMHO merged mining should be stopped until this situation is properly addressed.
Thing is, we have already had months to work on things, and no one has till it is almost here. I don't see a delay changing that. People need real coins to mm or they won't , as the lack of interest in the multicoin-exp test chains shows.
