Taek, thanks for all your efforts for this project. Good job keep it up!
Questions...
1. Does the hosting take bandwith into any consideration? Say if someone is hosting for really low price contracts, but limits their upload speed very low so that clients can't practically download their stuff, but the host still gets the contracts and the rewards because he's/her's contract price are really low? How is this problem solved?
2. Currently the hosting don't seem to be working for many of us with that port forward issue or is that fixed already? Please post instructions on OP when solved.
Thanks
1. The current wallet does not take bandwidth into account, but this is helped by redundancy. If, out of your 15 hosts, only 10 of them are really slow, you'll still be able to get the file from the fast ones. We don't have parallel downloads set up yet, but that will be here sooner rather than later. The storage platform is still in beta.
Long term, we will be using multiple algorithms and many metrics to choose hosts. The client will refuse to upload to slow hosts. Additionally, bandwidth will be paid for, which means hosts intentionally throttling their bandwidth are depriving themselves of bandwidth-income. Files will be on many hosts at the same time, and only the fast + cheap hosts will be selected for downloads. Files are going to be erasure coded across multiple hundred hosts, which will make it difficult to attack the network by intentionally offering low storage costs but then holding files ransom. That attack will only work if you get ALL of the redundancy of a file. There will be sybil attack countermeasures to prevent hosts from appearing like multiple trustworthy hosts (hosts will need to use 'proof of capacity' to prove that they have storage available, in additional to other cryptographic tools).
2. Hosting will only work if you forward your ports. This isn't something that we can easily fix.
www.portforward.com is a great resource for figuring out how to do this. For most people, forwarding ports is really easy, you just have to be shown how to do it the first time. We're sorry for this limitation, but forwarding ports is going to be a requirement for hosts for the forseeable future.
You will want to forward ports ":9981" and ":9982".
We'll have an FAQ out later this week that explains many of the common questions in one place.
My miner just says "Device max compute units : 18" but nothing about finding blocks , hashrate intensity etc , I think it is not mining since my computer has the same speed as before , how do i get it to start mining ?
Did you try restarting Sia and then restarting the miner? If the miner is working, it should display a hashrate. If restarting doesn't help, then we're not sure exactly what the problem is but we are trying to figure it out.
it looks like diff is rising 'cause I can't find blocks for many hours now.
besides, how to get the current difficulty? "siac status" returns a list of numbers I can't understand.
bump!
The difficulty retargets to 1 block every 10 minutes, or 144 per day. We were not expecting as much hashrate as happened on the first day, so the difficulty was wayyy too low. The result is that 1600 blocks got mined in the first 18 hours. The difficulty retargets every 500 blocks, and so far the difficulty has increased by the maximum allowed (2.5x) 3 times in a row. That's a total increase of 15x over the first set of blocks. That's why mining is so much slower now. Blocks are still appearing faster than 1 per 10 minutes, so the difficulty is going to increase again (probably substantially) when the height hits 2000.
