In this case, Merged Mining was not a tool, BUT A WEAPON
Think what you wish of Luke-jr's actions, but we did learn something from the coiledcoin fiasco:
You can no longer rely on free hashing power from merged mining to instantly make a new alt/scam coin resilient right from launch.
Going forward, new alt-coins will have to use incompatible mining schemes, and maybe, just maybe, we'll start seeing some real innovation in alt-coins.
BTW one thing that I have been wondering about for a long time is why has none of the alt-coins addressed the issue of the sudden halving of the mining reward after a year or two?
Do they not expect their alt-coin to survive long enough to even reach the halving point? (I.e. they are intended as ponzi scams right from the start.)
Just do a progressive diminution of reward
at every difficulty adjustment, it's not that hard.
Then we'll see what effect on mining the reduction of the reward might have.
I would even argue that we should try to change bitcoin itself to start using a progressive reduction of the mining reward to avoid the looming discontinuity.
We only need to convince the pool operators to switch, they collectively control more than half the hashing power.
