Does anyone know why there are no Scrypt based merged mining pools out their yet? I would imagine that if it was possible it would have been done already. There is no problem to do it with SHA-256 based coins, so why can't we do it with Scrypt?
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6 Answers
Found a helpful post at litecointalk:
It won't work because the aux work must be explicitly provided by the merge coin. All of these coins cloned from Litecoin lack that code as Litecoin doesn't have it. As a result you cannot merge mine these coins.
It is the same reason you can't merge mine Terracoin or Freicoin with Bitcoin. Freicoin considered it in the past as means to stabilize their network, but I'm guessing they decided against it because they are afraid of their value collapsing even more. Trouble is none of the small PoW coins are able to maintain a stable network if they are subject to sudden reorg attacks at any moment as many of the scrypt clone networks often experience. Thus avoiding merge coins to preserve "value" is illusory and self-defeating.
Also, apparently there is a scrypt coin designed for merged mining with Litecoin called UnitedScryptCoin, though I didn't have a chance to try it yet. Link to UnitedScryptCoin thread in bitcointalk.
The short answer is that there are, but you can't find them because Google is doing wierd things to altcoins in the search rankings.
Orgcoin www.orgcoin.org is a real coin designed to be merge mined with any scrypt chain. USC is similar in this regard as well.
The primary difference is that Orgcoin is already operating in house pools for LTC, DOGE, POT and any others upon request and is traded on several exchanges.
At the time of this writing, the current rate for ORG is on par with DOGE meaning you could potentially double your cashflow if you were mining it today. Not a pump, just a fact.
I'm sure more coins will come online shortly. But as one of the original posters said. The primary reason for a coin to merge mine is to secure it's blockchain against a 51% attack. The child coin needs code for that although the parent doesn't need to know nor care.
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I've not seen a Windows client for orgcoin, only code that has to be compiled and some Linux binaries provided by members of the community. Since I'm lazy - do you know of any semi-official Windows build? Commented Feb 20, 2014 at 17:06
Yes it is possible. Thre is (at least) one spanish pool (http://manicminer.in) mergemining.
You can choose to point your miner to one of 3 main chains (litecoin, dogecoin, potcoin) and you also get Pesetacoin (s spanish cryptocurrency) orgcoin , UnitedScrptCoin and huntercoin.
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And now also CatCoin and DigitalCoin. As more crypto-coins are merged mined with UnitedScryptCoin, more can be offered simultaneously by this pool, thus increasing the mining profitability in an almost free (to the miners) fashion. Kudos to the founders! Commented Feb 20, 2014 at 17:10
Merged mining takes advantage of an established blockchain for the security of the chain to avoid a high probability of a 51% attacks on the new coin.
So far, and to my knowledge, no Scrypt-based altcoin chains, not even Litecoin, are secure enough and have a diverse mining pool to avoid a 51% attack. As such, launching a merged-mining coin (For example a Proof of Stake Coin like Peercoin) on Litecoin would be very risky.
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Yeah, I can see a lot of people jumping on it if such a pool was to be created. Still, I'm surprised no one tried to create such a pool anyway, just of the sake of short term profit. Commented Jan 7, 2014 at 23:32
mergedmining coins do not take any extra power away from the parent block chain. an advantage to a merged mining coin would be the ability to merge it across several scrypt chains causing a higher level of security. there is one coin that runs with mergedmining, but to get it working you need to know a lot about coding. you must add the getauxpow commands and such so you can stick the header of the parent chain in to the child chain. Since most scrypt pools are run on MPOS/AIO installers, sadly most pool ops do not have the required skills to code their own merged mining pool server.
It is completely possible. Some reasons that could explain why no Scrypt chain merge mines with litecoin are that their developers haven't decided to do so, don't know how to do it or don't undesrtand its advantages. Most Scrypt currencies are just parameter tweaks on litecoin anyway, which was already a parameter tweak on bitcoin plus changing SHA256 for the less efficient to validate scrypt (using flawed arguments based on the "anti-ASIC" myth to attract uniformed users) in the first place.
If dogecoin, for example, merged mined with litecoin, it wouldn't be as secure as litecoin (whose reward is bigger) but it would become more secure than it is today.
