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Comment by elidourado | Hacker News Reader

> Blockchains are being used to implement solutions to different problems, and they could really solve some significant problems such as decentralized identity and reputation management (!). The difficulty lies in creating a significant enough "currency" so that miners will become involved and make the blockchain stable and reliable.

Author of the original article here. Namecoin is actually merge-mined with Bitcoin, so miner participation is not a serious problem. There's no way you could have known that without happening to know that, though, and I agree that this is an issue for a lot of new blockchain-based technologies.

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Maybe I've misunderstood it, but how does merge mining create an incentive to mine namecoins? I figured all it did was make it "cheaper" to mine namecoins by "reusing" work done for the bitcoin blockchain. In order for the namecoin network to function, you still need to actively get involved with it.

Here's some information on merge-mining for anyone else involved: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/273/how-does-merg... http://dot-bit.org/Merged_Mining

Most of the major Bitcoin mining pools also mine Namecoin. The current Namecoin hashrate is around 60% of the Bitcoin hashrate. http://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-btc-nmc.html

Well, that's a lot! I didn't expect it to be significant compared to the bitcoin pool.

Do you know how that came to be? i.e how did they convince everyone to start mining namecoin? Or was it just good timing WRT bitcoin?

Merged mining has good incentives since it basically gives free money; for the same work of mining Bitcoin you can mine Bitcoin and Namecoin simultaneously.

I'm not too sure. A lot of people in the cryptocurrency community are saying that something like Namecoin is going to be the second major blockchain-based technology after payments, so maybe it just got the right kind of press at the right time, as you say.

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