You seem to be in the know ... care to share your wisdom?
I'm curious about the other blockchains hiding out there as well...
Definitely like the idea of doing it with namecoin, would help get it more mainstream I think.
Probably talking about
Multicoin,
Groupcoin,
Goldcoin and Stablecoin. Personally I don't see much value in Groupcoin, Goldcoin and Stablecoin. Can't comment in Multicoin because I don't get it.
What about the economic performance disadvantages of the respective currencies?
Won't this devalue bitcoin?
I think this would devalue bitcoins, as well as any other coins that get added. Hundreds of new coins will be added at no extra cost (as markm already confirmed). All of those coins will be at jeopardy of losing value and might even get rejected.
The cost of mining BTC will stay equal. The only way that merged mining would be able to devalue BTC is if people start caring more about NMC (or any other currency) and they sell their BTC for it.
If only the POOL Operators need to change something for merge mining, and the miner doesn't need to change anything -- to merge mine in a pool then, my hashing could be used for hacking/cracking/decrypting by the pool, without my knowledge?
They wouldn't be able to do that because decrypting/cracking passwords requires a different type of computation, so if they added something like that to their software the hashing speed of miners would noticeably diminish.