Mining

[phelixbtc]

There should be a page about p2pool, normal pools and merged mining to promote mining Namecoin. Maybe a link to the wiki. The aggregator issue showed once more that mining as the system basis is important.

[indolering]

I'm resolutely against this being on the main site, it belongs in the wiki and developer docs. If you are really concerned about this, then get more pools mining.

[JeremyRand]

@phelixbtc What info are you looking to put there? If it's stuff that's useful for average miners (including P2Pool), then I'm fine with having it on www.namecoin.info (not too prominent, but easy to find). If it's just aimed at pool operators, then I'm still fine with having it on www.namecoin.info, but in a "developers" section which would also cover the namecoind/NMControl API's, etc.

@indolering What is your objection to having mining mentioned on www.namecoin.info?

[indolering]

What is your objection to having mining mentioned on www.namecoin.info?

It's an inappropriate use of limited real-estate. There are maybe ~20-30 who control a mining pool. I can give you the contact information of ~5 pools that do not merge-mine Namecoin that make up 17% of Bitcoin's hashing power.

This is an important issue but contacting those people is the correct step to take, adding a section to the website for an audience <10 people who will simply Google "merge-mine namecoin" is an utter waste. This is a "feel good" item that makes someone feel good but does nothing to solve the problem.

[JeremyRand]

@indolering Read this again:

"If it's stuff that's useful for average miners (including P2Pool), then I'm fine with having it on www.namecoin.info (not too prominent, but easy to find). If it's just aimed at pool operators, then I'm still fine with having it on www.namecoin.info, but in a "developers" section which would also cover the namecoind/NMControl API's, etc."

It sounds like you're criticizing info aimed at pool operators, which wasn't what I was advocating to have easily findable.

[indolering]

@JeremyRand Explain the use-case to me. A random miner happens to be reading our webpage and then reads the importance of mining Namecoin and then decides to merge-mine? Any miner who wants information on merge-mining namecoin to start by searching for something like "mine namecoin" which will turn up the appropriate documentation on the subject.

There is a finite amount of space on the website with which we need to convince investors, grant committees, and average users of the worth of Namecoin. There are much better ways of addressing the mining issue which do not require competing for other topics on the website.

[phelixbtc]

Agreed, we need to be careful and only put important information on the website. I never meant this to be targeted specifically at pool operators. The goal I have in mind is to support miners to p2pool mine Namecoin or direct them to Namecoin friendly pools.

[JeremyRand]

I agree with @phelixbtc , I interpreted the issue as talking about information for end users who want to mine Namecoin, not pool operators. A properly designed website will not have problems just because there's a link to mining information. So, I support making mining information (aimed at end users) available on the website.

@indolering are you seriously saying that we should rely on a search engine to make that information available to our users?

[indolering]

@phelixbtc I've got a list of pools that don't mine Namecoin, why don't you try getting them to mine Namecoin? None of them were hostile to the idea, they just gave up in frustration. Then all the pools would be Namecoin friendly. Why do you point people to P2Pool when merge-mining is basically solo mining?. Documentation is not a valid fix for underlying UX problems.

@JeremyRand Are you seriously suggesting people don't rely on Google for most of their navigation? I've done user studies on documentation, I've watched users struggle with an interface and skip the finely curated docs I created for a quick Google search. I was wrong about how I thought users would interact with documentation because of how much effort I put into it.

If you insist on design-by-committee then I'm going to insist on processes designed to protect the UX from death-by-committee. The way we handle this in UX land is through personas, a concensus and data driven process for creating and evaluating use cases. We'll have to setup a meeting of the main developers (or whomever wants to play a major role in website content) to hash out the initial personas. Then I'll setup analytics for the main site and validate whatever personas we come up with. We can even create a page in the documentation for merge-mining and have a section on the main site and quantify the % of visitors looking for that information and how many find it via Google vs internal linking.

If you think that's a lot of work for a small section on the website, well, we seem to be having the same types of disagreements about the website and this is the only way I know how to do this in a way that doesn't leave everyone mutually irritated with each other.

[JeremyRand]

@indolering Two points here.

1. I definitely use links on the official site instead of search engines if I can find the link easily.
2. Search engines use the links on the official site to determine ranking. So linking to it on the site makes it easier to find with a search engines.

Regarding P2Pool, it's not useful for protecting the Namecoin network since it's effectively solo mining. We should do at least one of the following:

1. Get P2Pool to support sharechains for merge-mined coins.
2. Make getblocktemplate work properly on Namecoin and implement the decentralization interface that Luke-Jr mentioned.

If we don't do one of those, then we might as well just tell people to pick a small pool.

[phelixbtc]

@JeremyRand "Regarding P2Pool, it's not useful for protecting the Namecoin network since it's effectively solo mining." Why is it not useful?

Anyway I think 1. is a good idea but I could not get an answer from forrest about it so far.

How would getblocktemplate help Namecoin in particular?

"If we don't do one of those, then we might as well just tell people to pick a small pool."
Yep, for now we should probably suggest that as the first alternative.

[JeremyRand]

@phelixbtc It's not useful in the sense that small miners won't use it since there's no sharechain, which turns it into a random lottery that they will never win. Large miners don't need P2Pool since they can solomine. So P2Pool has no benefit to the Namecoin network.

getblocktemplate allows individual miners to choose which transactions to put into a block rather than the pool deciding. It's not supported properly on Namecoin, and the mining software currently available doesn't handle that decentralization properly. @luke-jr might be able to elaborate more on this.

[luke-jr]

After discussion with some other devs, we concluded that properly supporting GBT with namecoin may require a hardfork to improve merged mining. The proposed hardfork would have other benefits to namecoin too (reducing useless garbage stored in the PoW).