Namecoin Forum

I have one rig up and running mining solo. I was thinking of adding another rig to mine pointed to the current rig by adding an entry in the conf file. If my current rig stops mining for any reason all the progress is lost, I was thinking if I had 2 rigs pointed at same instance of namecoind then together their total hashing power would help decode blocks faster and if either of the rigs went down from a mining side ( as long as namecoind is still running) I wouldn't lose all the progress on the block since the other rig is pointed at it and still computing. Am I understanding this correctly?

The reason I ask is that this morning I was very close to statistically solving a block (given average times etc etc) and the miners crashed for some reason, if I had another rig pointed at the namecoind server, would it still have continued working on that block?

Don't worry, unless your miners actually happened to find a block the very moment they crashed, you didn't lose anything.

Think of mining as something like this: you have a pile of a gazillion lottery tickets, a few hundred thousand of which are winners. So you take one ticket at random, check if it is a winner, put it back into the pile and mix the pile well. It's not like you're putting the bad tickets away, and the past tickets you have examined have no effect on your chances of the next one being a winner.

thanks for the explanation. I was getting a little confused thinking there was some kind of progress that was made hashing the blocks and if my miners stopped i lost that progress. Now i know otherwise. Going to add some rigs to one namecoind instance running on a seperate independent machine not mining to help balance loads and what not. Run my miners independently of the namecoind machine which should work. thanks once again.