Namecoin Difficulty and the Death of the American Dream

[brukmann]

Greetings all,

I am currently acquainting myself with the history and development of namecoin, so I don't purport to know everything, but I am a bit concerned we're in the midst of an easily avoidable problem. IMHO, one failure to act or bad decision can destroy such a nascent system, or hobble it enough that it never grows beyond a small community of die-hards. (whereas U.S. banks can nearly destroy the world economy with 1M bad decisions and they are 'too big to fail')

Currently difficulty is 4x what it should be. Everyone is aware of this, some lament it, and solutions are casually mentioned without any urgency to act. Perhaps i need to lurk longer to get a sense of why, maybe because namecoin is in an alpha state it is not considered detrimental that the network capacity absolutely will not grow until November.

I understand the principle that the system should regulate itself, but the current difficulty rules don't produce reasonable results when the mining input varies rapidly. The rules make sense for a lone network like Bitcoin, where purpose-built machines had little other use than mining that one network. Namecoin, on the other hand, will for the foreseeable future get most of its hashing power *not* from die-hard supporters, but from profit-motivated Bitcoin people who now have two viable networks to choose from. It has a unique problem that Bitcoin does not, so the same code doesn't produce good results.

Doing nothing, waiting until November 13th (as of this writing) for block 20160, will let difficulty drop to maybe 24k. At that point if 1 Terahash jumps on we'll reach block 22186 in about 3 days. All the BTC offers on the exchange will be vacuumed out. Then difficulty will adjust to match the hash rate and the profitability will disappear, so another huge drop and blocks that take 1 day again...Which will force us to make changes to the way difficulty is adjusted anyway.

I'm at work so i got busy and lost my train of thought, but since i'm already pushing tl;dr, i'll just ask, am i missing something? Isn't it smart to address this immediately? What needs to happen? Can a client update for this give more incentive for people to update before the block 24000 changes?

Thanks.

/H.S.Thompson ref in title, btw

[doublec]

I'm at work so i got busy and lost my train of thought, but since i'm already pushing tl;dr, i'll just ask, am i missing something? Isn't it smart to address this immediately? What needs to happen? Can a client update for this give more incentive for people to update before the block 24000 changes?

I think the merged mining work is considered to be a solution to the problem. Work is ongoing on that. Apart from that, ideas and proposals for an alternative fix are useful. What are your thoughts?

[moa]

Of course, you could as easily argue that the problem is the NMC/BTC exchange rate is not favouring NMC mining at present and this is primarily due to the lack of demand for NMC relative to BTC.

You are correct about it being in a nascent stage, smoother growth would have been desirable. An alternative solution was to have difficulty adjustment on 2016 blocks OR 14 days, whichever came first, although work on implementing that was not carried through for various reasons (the mature system probably does not need the OR 14 days only whilst steady growth is needed).

Merged mining is supposed to solve many ills, but I am concerned about how many hidden ones it will throw up ... particularly insurmountable ones.

[MaxSan]

How feasable is it to alter the code to make difficulty update every 14 days?

Whats the likelyhood of getting merged mining moved up?

I have faith in this project and hope it doesnt die due to greedy miners.

[doublec]

How feasable is it to alter the code to make difficulty update every 14 days?

The i0coin chain has made this change btw. It adjusts when X number of blocks are reached or X number days, whichever comes first.

[phelix]

How feasable is it to alter the code to make difficulty update every 14 days?

The i0coin chain has made this change btw. It adjusts when X number of blocks are reached or X number days, whichever comes first.

+1

[gigabytecoin]

Every day that Namecoin sits on the sidelines, we learn from Bitcoin's mistakes

[vinced]

I currently plan to push for merged mining to launch in the next four weeks.