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 237 EH/s in December 2022, 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.

Currently, we have a hashrate of 166 EH/s for Namecoin​. So if we ignore the hashrate resulting from mining e.g. along with Bitcoin Cash, it can be said that about 60 % of the Bitcoin miners use Namecoin for their merged mining pair. 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)