How to mine Namecoin

Since October 2011, the Namecoin blockchain is written using merged mining (AuxPoW), along with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. In principle, an ASIC miner would be able to perform solo mining via the Namecoin Core wallet. However, compared to Bitcoin's total hashing capacity of around 391 EH/s in September 2023, it would take months to mine one block. The latest and most powerful miners in June 2022 have a hashrate of 198 TH/s (at a purchase price of about $15,000 USD per miner), which is a factor of less than 1:1 million compared to the total hashrate of the Bitcoin network on which Namecoin is mined. Therefore, nowadays every miner is connected to a mining pool, where miners combine their computing power and share the profits.

In September 2023, we have a hashrate of 206 EH/s for Namecoin​. If we ignore the hashrate resulting from mining e.g. along with Bitcoin Cash, we can say that about 53 % of all Bitcoin miners use Namecoin as their merged mining pair. At the same time, the costs of mining 1 BTC are about $35,000 USD. So, with about 150 blocks per day (with the average block time of 10 minutes), the investment made by the mining operators is about $5.25 million USD per day to secure the Bitcoin ecosystem. Taking the part dedicated to the merged mining of Namecoin results in an investment of about $2.8 million USD. Per day. Taken to ensure the data integrity and security of the Namecoin ecosystem.

Below the largest pools with their proportional hashrate (July 2021):

f2pool.com
22 %, pool fee: 2.5 % PPS+

antpool.com
17 %, pool fee: 0 % PPLNS, 6.0 % PPS+

viabtc.com
16 %, pool fee: 2.0 % PPLNS, 4.0 % PPS+

poolin.me
13 %, pool fee: 2.5 % FPPS

binance.com
12 %, pool fee: 2.5 % FPPS

btc.com
7 %, pool fee: 1.5 % FPPS


Legend:

FPPS
Full Pay-Per-Share (continuous reward each block, including mined transaction fees)

PPS+
Pay Per Share Plus (continuous reward each block, including mined transaction fees)

PPLNS
Pay-Per-Last-N-Shares (accumulated reward after mined block, no reward if miner gets disconnected from pool before)