Quote from: P4man on November 08, 2011, 09:18:21 PM

wOOt. Found my second ever BTC block

Congrats!

Quote from: teflone on November 09, 2011, 12:15:47 AM

I just thought they were separate networks of sorts.. Im surprised to find it works like this..

They were completely separate networks until merged mining was invented. Merged mining is what makes it possible to create a namecoin block with a proof of work for a bitcoin block. So ever since merged mining, if a pool implements it, things work like DeathAndTaxes just explained. Very good explanations, by the way, DAT.

Before anyone asks, no, we can't add other coins. The auxiliary chain that you "merge" into your bitcoin mining has to support merged mining, and at the moment this is only supported by namecoins.

By the way, this morning we had a proof of work that could have created a namecoin block, but it was stale on the namecoin side. It's not good having 5% of proofs be stale on the NMC side. I'll get out an update for the BitMinter beta client soon (regular non-beta should be fine already). Does anyone know if a new cgminer has been released that works better with merged mining?