This is how normal currency works though right? My £10 is worth less in 10 years than it is today.

We dont know.

they are competing for investors and miners but not for retailers and businesses. namecoin is for domains, bitcoins for the broad market (buy real goods, ..). most people will never use namecoins or even hear about it.

Additionally very good news, the popular financial site stocktwits allows user to track bitcoin related news with the symbol $BCOIN

I still dont understand how this is a good thing for bitcoins. It's still competition and it's actually competition in a market that presumably is an important one for bitcoins.

It isn't a good thing for bitcoin. Ideally the DNS service would get it's proof of work from the bitcoin block-chain.

depends on your prespective, they are competing in markets which aren't relavant to normal users.

some miners will be shifting to namecoins, is this bad? for me as an investor not really, i dont mind if the supplygrowth drops. some investors will buy some namecoins, lower demand for bitcoins or higher supply (if you exchange BTc vs namecoins), which leads c.p. to lower prices. i dont know which effect is dominant. but the market is very small and doesnt matter that much.

namecoin promotes the .bit domain which doesnt negatively affect the brand bitcoin.

Nice find.

:|

https://exchange.bitparking.com/main allows you to change between bit and namecoins

Disclosure: i have bitcoins and namecoins, but im not participating in the development of either project

This is a bug of the current currency, not a feature. It's also why people only hold onto as little as possible.

The current currency also doesnt have a fixed depreciation rate.

Difficulty = 877226


How can I find out the average rise of USD/BTC?

http://bitcoincharts.com/t/trades.csv?symbol=mtgoxUSD

Disclosure: I run the above exchange and one of the namecoin pools (disclosed so you can keep this bias in mind if I discuss it). Regarding the comment that namecoin should use the bitcoin block chain, there is work ongoing to enable cross mining. You can get a chart of mining profitability here which compares bitcoin vs namecoin.

Wow didn't realize you were a 2+2er. Did anything happen to the pool in the last 12 hours or so? Woke up with much fewer coins than expected, though I switched all but one of my miners to solo.

Nice work with the pool. Quick, simple and effective.

Thanks! Unfortunately growth has exceeded my sysadmin skills (of which I have little) to keep the server stable and scaling. Once we hit 180+ Ghash, I hit problems. I've temporarily brought another server online to load balance and I'll look at a dedicated server in the next day or so.

Haha you and every other pool. just making sure it wasn't something weird going on. I only have one miner not on my mining proxy so it wasn't much harm.

What about something that is easier to scale like AWS? You could potentially build an app server and spin up additional instances for a cluster as you grow.

I think you're just getting started with the growth, btw, so you should look beyond a single dedicated server to what is going to happen when you start getting DDOSed like all the BTC pools.

I'm considering AWS - I use them already in another project. I'm not sure how they react to a DDOS (in terms of support) and their handling of Wikileaks is a point against them - Wikileaks recently tweeted about namecoin and bitcoin being important and it would be sad to have AWS shut down bitcoin/namecoin related activities by association.

FWIW, as someone who was also new to sysadmin stuff, I've found Rackspace to be very user friendly.

That is something I hadn't considered with AWS, but I think wikileaks is a pretty extreme case. I haven't heard of other cases of AWS shutting down sites without a clear TOS violation.

That being said you'll need reliable off site backups and possible DR options available with any host you choose.

Rackspace is top notch and has been that way for at least 6-7 years. Great management and support. Also, it's probably worthwhile at this point to pay for someone with greater sysadmin abilities than yourself.

Your exchange and pool are both the standard right now, so attacks on either will start to decrease confidence in them. You can be both Tycho and Tux of the namecoin world if you play it smart Those guys are both making pretty good money off this.

I haven't signed up or done anything with BC, but from what I've read it seems like a huge hassle to get set up to deal with teh stuff and protect your stash. How does the community expect the average Joe to adopt this stuff when paypal and credit cards are so much easier?

anyone knows why the trading volume is so low atm? are people trading over tradehill or are they more careful after the decline?
havent been online all day, yesterday mt gox' site was down a lot

yeah most of it is likely due to
1) decline to $10 has people worried
2) DDOS makes it difficult to get on MtGOX
3) i heard reports of dwolla delays last week, which means little activity this week

I don't think tradehill is a significant factor since volume there is pretty much nonexistent compared to Gox.

I expected a rally this week. Kind of surprising.

what do you guys think will happen, when bitcoin would get millions of users and million transactions per day. blocks would get really big and would need to be broadcasted to all clients.
could this potentially deadlock the whole p2p network?

There was a rally, from $10 to $20.

It's much less of a hassle now than it used to be. It makes little sense to use it instead of PayPal or credit cards as a buyer. However, if you get a discount when purchasing, it might be worth using. Also, some places might only accept Bitcoins (silk road, poker sites, etc...).

PayPal takes time as well.

Bitcoin DROs:

1) firms compete to offer coin labeling services. coins can be marked as stolen, or having been used in drug trade, or as being especially unlikely to be stolen or whatever
2) firms compete to offer coin filtering services. a business can tell a customer that any coins marked "stolen" will be immediately sent to an arbiter. maybe a business will tell customers that their funds will immediately be returned if their coins are marked "used in marijuana trade". then that business effectively only trades with other people that hate pot.
3) firms compete to offer coin recovery services. give someone lots of access and it's not so hard for them to prove theft
4) firms compete to provide arbitration