1) the problem with merged mining: i looked a little bit over the code, an afaik you are only checking your own hashes against namecoin or whatevercoin and you get the hole block, so alternative-blockchains are solo mining.
my evil side says me that all good bitcoin hashes are stored in this history-db to do double checking (verification of the share-history so there are no "cheaters") and if i understand the merged mining stuff right ever good bitcoin-share could also be a good namecoin-share, so all i have to do is set up a little "optimized" P2P-Pool-server with or without a miner and send every new share that is coming over P2P to my alternative "solo-mining-namecoin-server" and hope that there is a positive match!
or did i miss something? i guess i am not the only one with this idea....
my suggestion is that there should be at least an namecoin support by sending the share with bitcoin&namecoin-adresse, so that also the namecoins are splitted over the users that provide a valid namecoin adresse and if an share without valid namecoinadress comes over P2P there should be a check by the merged-miners
i know there are more alternative chains but namecoin is by hashrate the second one! and namecoins are a good idea, my opinion is that other currencies are only splitting the community
You can't use somebody else's share as a Namecoin attempt that would pay you. The Namecoin blocks all include a transaction to the miner that created it, which you can't change. Changing it would change the block's hash, making it worthless. Also, you can't use a non-Namecoin share to get NMC, because Namecoin requires a special tag to be inside the block.
Yeah, I'm working towards pooled merged Namecoin mining.
2)version stuff: at some releases you are writting that everbody has to update the version, what would happen if i am not able to update because of some remotecontrol-problems? is there some kind of protocol version? i didn't look that up in your code, i would prefer a split of the pools so that people who arent updating because of what ever are mining with the other non-updaters
That will already happen - the sharechain will fork, with old miners on one side and new miners on the other.
Also, I try to schedule these forking changes at least a few weeks in the future, so everyone has a lot of time to upgrade. For example, the last change that went from a 12 hour to 24 hour payout period was included in a release 25 days before the actual change happened.
3)small thing: it would be nice if there would be some proxy(tor) support, i know that when everbody would use this over tor there would be a major connection problem, but not more as if nobody would make a port-redirect on there routers
Tor would probably increase latency quite a bit... But in any case, you can already do it with tsocks:
tsocks python run_p2pool.py ... should work fine.
