Topic: [ANN][BLC] Blakecoin Blake-256 for GPU/FPGA With Merged Mined Pools Stable Net - page 142. (Read 409569 times)

I'ld love to help out with blakecoins some how, some where. Other than an exchange, what else is there? Mining pool? payment gateway? If someone can point me in the right direction, I should be able to gather the necessary resources. Anyone wants to chip in is very much welcome :-)

I've access to developers, dedicated servers, data centers, even willing to pay third party security auditors. The developers are primarily .Net though.

Exactly. This is why you use a couple of different exchanges, and don't use any of them for long-term storage.

However, I'd rather not open yet another exchange account for BLC only. As others have pointed out, there needs to be something else for a new site to stand out, like a prudent selection of meaningful currencies. This will also help keep the interface clean; one of my favourites is BTC-e, whereas sites like Bter and Cryptsy are just messy.

every exchange has been hit at one point including MtGox, none of them are safe just some are better than others 

Those guys are extreme amateurs. Afaik they were using ssh server running on default port with plain text password authentication. All the wallets were on the same server as the exchange. They never heard about cold storage. No script to ban noisy people. The list probably goes on.
Im not saying im a pro, but even my local servers are more secure than that.
On the other hand an exchange can be quite a lucrative enterprise and since the market seems to need them they are poping up like crazy recently.

though you might find it useful have fun 

Thanks, that looks very useful! It'll probably keep me occupied for quite some time

you do some amazing work kramble  

if there is any way I can help with your other algo projects just let me know  

this is quite good for VHDL ref:
http://cryptography.gmu.edu/athena/index.php?id=source_codes

Thanks Blue

I probably shouldn't hijack this thread, so I'll be brief (I guess we should create a new thread to discuss ALT hashing algos). VHDL is my bugbear right now as I'm far more familiar with Verilog, but its what's publicly available (I was lucky with blake in that you found some verilog code for me to work off). I'm currently looking at http://www.iis.ee.ethz.ch/~sha3/ which has VHDL implementations of all the NIST SHA-3 candidates. I'd like to get keccak working first since this was the officially adopted SHA-3 algo, so its bound to come up in ALT coins sooner or later (already in copperlark, and there is the new eCoin, but no wallet code released yet). All just for fun of course

even the best developers and server admins should not look at an exchange system and think they can secure it 100% its better to design such as system with the thought of its going to get hacked how do we limit the damage done

I agree picking some good well supported coins that have been about for at least one month and have active dev's, would be nice if an exchange picked coins on technical merit  

Prelude, It would be great if you started another exchange, but as others are pointing out, make sure you are prepared. Make sure your developers and server admins REALLY know what they are doing. And you'll need some way to stand out, I would suggest by carefully picking which coins you trade based on technical merit, rather than just trading any/all new junk / hype coins

I tested most of those hashing algo's 100% sure they can't beat Blake-256 on size(fpga) or speed(hashrate) it does help that I reduced the rounds

keccak is slow and quite large area needed for fpga (they picked it for its sponge function as it was different to SHA-256 not its performance)
skein is slow and needs same sort of space as SHA-256
grostl still quite slow and was not that fast on fpga
JH is slow and again not that fast on fpga

these are quite good:
BMW-256 is good and quite fast it should be quite small on fpga but all in VHDL
Blake2 faster than Blake but to get good performance you need to remove the endianess from the wallet

did you see what happened to OpenEx(open source exchange) hacked within 2 weeks wallets stolen and people lost money not good  

setting up an exchange is super high risk as it will get hacked at some point!

I have access to investors and coming out with a working prototype should get us some funding to secure it and see it to production.

Lots of room for improvement in the bitstream. AFAIR (I'm not firing up the build machine just to check) its only around 50% utilization of the LE, and zero utilization of DSP or RAM. Plenty of scope for tuning the implementaton. I'd have done a bit more, but I got bogged down in the ISE "tweak the tables setting and build again" cycle for chasing best FMAX, and that's enough to sap all enthusiasm after a few dozen tries. Some expert attention would probably double the performance overall. Anyway, just sayin as I don't intend going back over it, at least for a while anyway.

Read this first: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/openex-hacked-but-coins-recovered-414777

In other words, if you don't have the experience/expertise to handle other people's money, better just talk to established exchanges in order for them to adopt BLC.

This is exactly what I did a few weeks ago, as I'm also interested in following other developments such as Scrypt on FPGAs. Paid 150€ for a bitstream-compatible clone, which I received last week. The speed is closer to 1.5 GH/s but I'm only using the default automatic adjustment, so there might be room for improvement.

I like blakecoin and I am interested to setup an exchange for blakecoin. Anyone else interested? We can pool our resources together to make this happen.

So youre getting around 1.6GH/s on ZTEX 1.15y? On Ztex site they are selling those boards for 500eur, but Ive found used ones for around 100eur. Given this price Im actually considering buying one to mine blakecoin (and possibly other coins in the future) ;]

As teknohog said. Scrypt perfomance on FPGA is pretty dire. I've got 60kHash/sec from a quad LX150 board (ztex 1.15y and Cairnsmore CM1). There is not currently a port for the 1.15x (I've been lazy), but it would only give around 15kHash/sec so its hardly worthwhile.

I am currently looking into keccak (SHA-3) as used in copperlark, but the example code is in VHDL which I'm not at all familiar with. That and my muse seems to have left me at the moment, so I'm finding it difficult to focus on the task.

There are several other hashing algorithms (the non-winning candidates for the NIST SHA-3 competition) that are suitable for FPGA (blake was one, also skein, grostl, JH) which Quark Coin uses, but in a way that makes a FPGA implementation difficult (it uses multiple hash algorithms and swaps between them on the fly). Then we have the likes of Primecoin which just won't fit at all (way too much RAM), and tweaks to the scrypt algorithm (YaCoin, Vertcoin) which may be possible in FPGA (Windmaster mined YAC on FPGA in its early days using a private bitstream, and I did a quick and dirty port of my litecoin miner for N=2048 to mine Vertcoin, but the hash rates are just not worth the bother).

PS, and looky here, they've just announced eCoin to use SHA-3 (like, this is why I've been looking at this in the first place, expecting new coins to use it), shame I've been so lazy recently and just not got it done 

I'd say it's the only non-sha256 coin you can sensibly* mine with FPGAs.

Bitcoin uses sha256, but so do many other coins like Peercoin. Generally, you can use the same hardware for all coins that use the same hash algorithm. There are only a handful of different hash algos, compared to the bazillions of funnycoins and memecoins.

*(There are FPGA and ASIC miners being developed for Scrypt (e.g. Litecoin). For example kramble here has done some nice work with FPGAs However, it's not yet a huge threat to GPU mining -- the nature of Scrypt means that it needs a lot of fast RAM, which FPGAs don't have.)