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What is needed to create a new pool with merged mining? (Bitcoin, NameCoin, and possibly others)?
I'd like to create a new pool that will
I'm mostly interested in software, or general knowledge that will get me started in the right direction.
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You will need to be running the standard client with some special configuration - server=1 along with rpcuser and rpcpassword set. After that, you need to build your pool server to communicate with it through Bitcoin API and handle everything else. Last part is not too Bitcoin-specific and will consume a lot of your development time (I would know, I tried it ;) ).
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You need to run both bitcoind and namecoind.
To be able to create namecoin blocks you will need to do merged mining. Either find pool software that does this out of the box, or implement it yourself following the merged mining specification.
Other coins that support merged mining work the same way as namecoin.
With Stratum or getblocktemplate (GBT) there should not be any efficiency problems. With the old getwork protocol you may have a slight drop in efficiency from extra long poll notifications. That's because miners may need additional HTTP requests to get enough work after the long poll. You may want to consider whether you want to do long poll only for bitcoin. But as miners move away from getwork this may not be worth bothering with.
Does the pool do the merged mining, or is that from the BitCoin API? Can you recommend any pool software? – goodguys_activate – 2012-12-06T22:34:21.317
@makerofthings7 Hmm, as far as I remember there is a special application that communicates with both Bitcoin and Namecoin clients to get the appropriate information, then makes a new block for getwork request. I can't really recommend anything, as I haven't really looked into any such software. – ThePiachu – 2012-12-07T09:24:33.423