An interesting topic i don't see discussed much, what if bitcoin forks with features the community doesn't want. Does ixcoin become more attractive or will ixc always be developed in lock step?
Maybe miners are waiting for blocks to fill so they can pump IXC. If they cared about Bitcoin transactions they wouldn't waste resources merge mining
Apparently IXC is trying to follow the Bitcoin 0.8.x release. That will have the same block-size limit unless they changed it (I have not checked the source-code). I also believe that any coin with a faster emission curve than Bitcoin should be considered a possible scamcoin.
Merged mining costs 400-1500MB of RAM (namecoin is 495MB on my node) and ~2-20GB of disk (namecoin uses 2.9GiB on my node) to run another *coin instance. Other than that, it does not really take any more resources. Some mining hardware does not like frequent restarts; which happen more often with merged-mining. Note: My node goes down tomorrow due to lack of funds. (I am firmly in "little people" territory.)
I am torn whether we should simply ignore Mircea Popescu (and his supporters), or try to continue to teach them the error in their ways on this issue.
I think I read somewhere that he is still on one of the 0.4.x clients. He distrusts a lot of the new features introduced since then. He believes that Bitcoin core should not have a wallet built-in at all. (0.9.x does let you disable the wallet).
I don't think he trusts the Obelisk effort either. Without a detailed spec, forks are likely if alternate Bitcoin node software is not bug-for-bug compatible. This was recently illustrated with
recent versions of OpenSSL not being bug-for bug compatible (and causing a fork).