imho that approach would have worked if they had implemented merged mining before implementing namecoin. That's somewhat of a moronic statement considering the

imho that approach would have worked if they had implemented merged mining before implementing namecoin. That's somewhat of a moronic statement considering the namecoin crew invented the idea of merged mining. But I digress... I remember back when namecoin came out... they started the difficulty at 512 instead of 1 (bitcoin's initial difficulty) which made sense at the time, because GPUs were everywhere by then. But with namecoin being so new (and worthless) the difficulty soon dropped to the ~200 range, and anybody with a few GPUs could literally mine 1,000s of NMC per day. Case in point, the 50 NMC they charged for the first domains was still much too cheap. One could theoretically mine with an average rig for 1 week and register a few hundred of the first domains available.