Namecoin Pool Share Shift
how it’s computed →
Each day’s share is that pool’s blocks divided by all NMC blocks found that UTC day, the pool read from the Bitcoin coinbase inside each AuxPoW header. Only complete days are drawn — today never is.
The six pools with the largest trailing share are drawn; everything else is counted as other. The headline score is z = (s − s̄) / √(s̄(1−s̄)/N) against the trailing seven full days: |z| ≥ 4 is an event, pools under 2% of trailing share are not scored, and days with fewer than 50 blocks are skipped.
s_p(d) = blocks found by pool p on UTC day d / all blocks that day; baseline = the pool's share over the trailing 7 full days; z = (s_p(d) - baseline) / sqrt(baseline*(1-baseline)/N_d) (binomial, N_d = blocks that day); event = |z| >= 4; pools below 2% trailing share are not scored
What a pool share shift is
Pool share shift is the one-day change in a mining pool’s share of Namecoin blocks, measured against that pool’s own trailing week and scored in standard deviations of block luck. On Namecoin the pool behind a block is read from the Bitcoin coinbase embedded in its AuxPoW header — NMC is merge-mined under Bitcoin parent pools, so a shift here is a shift in whose parent work carried NMC that day, not a decision any NMC-side miner made. In our dated attribution study (2026-10-02 → 2026-10-10), AntPool 33.1%, F2Pool 28.7% and ViaBTC 14.7% of NMC blocks carried those tags. This is where merged mining began: chain ID 1, running since block 19,200 in October 2011 — the longest-lived AuxPoW arrangement in existence.
How much is luck on Namecoin
Namecoin targets a block every 600 seconds — about 144 a day — so a pool holding 33.1% of the chain — AntPool, in our dated attribution study (2026-10-02 → 2026-10-10) — expects to wobble about ±3.9 percentage points on an ordinary day from luck alone. The event line is drawn at four of those standard deviations, from that arithmetic and nothing else; a day that reads 2σ is weather, not news. Retarget cadence is irrelevant here (Namecoin 2016-block retarget epochs): difficulty decides how many blocks a day there are, not who finds them.
FAQ
- Is a 2σ move on Namecoin an event?
- No. With about 144 NMC blocks a day, a pool holding 33.1% of the chain wobbles about ±3.9 percentage points from luck alone. The line is drawn at 4σ so that pure luck produces fewer than one false event per pool per century of days.
- Does this say who mines Namecoin?
- It names who found the Bitcoin parent block. Namecoin is merge-mined under Bitcoin parent pools, and some parent pools do not pay NMC to their miners — the note at the top of this page says so. A shift here is a shift in whose parent work carried NMC that day.
- Why share of blocks and not hashrate per pool?
- Pool hashrate is not on-chain; block counts are. A pool’s share of the day’s blocks times the network hashrate is an estimate with its own luck error bar, so we score the share itself — the quantity our Namecoin node can actually count.