Topic: Bitcoin - we have a problem. - page 2. (Read 14540 times)

Cool story bro.  I've debated this to death in other threads and the fact is people with BFL hardware have been able to make it work by tweaking a few things.

Edit: removed quotes since you fucked them up

So to clarify when using P2pool it is your local bitcoind that is issuing the response to the getwork request that is then relayed through the p2p node and then to your miner?

The point I am trying to make here is this - If for example you are mining against a traditional PPS pool and you have written a proxy that sits between your miner and the pool. This proxy checks the difficulty of the solved block before forwarding it to the pool. If the proxy receives a solved block that meets the difficulty it then forwards it to your local bitcoind. The local bitcoind will reject this solved block because the Merkle tree is different for the two bitcoind servers preventing you from "stealing" the block.

What I am trying to understand here is when using p2pool if your local bitcoind is issuing the getwork then using the proxy to intercept a solved share of required difficulty from your miner and sending that straight to the local bitcoind and not back to the p2pnode why would it not be accepted and the wallet be credited with bitcoins and the p2pnode would be none the wiser. So effectively you would be getting paid for shares and then take the full reward for yourself?

Because every one of those nodes connects you to the same pool.  You can't have it both ways.  Either you use someone else's node, or you get your hands dirty and run your own.

I don't see how that is any different to using a mining pool?

I thought the point of the p2pool is that every miner runs a p2p node?

For the Layman:
http://p2pool.hostv.pl/

Pick one, point your miner at it, done.

Shares always have to payout to the current payout list to be valid on p2pool.  The software does send it to bitcoind if it is a valid block to make sure it is broadcast as soon as possible.  There is no way to change the way the payout is done.  If you change that, you have to start the proof of work all over again.

As for high variance, pooling hashpower to a single p2pool address is possible.  In fact, I ran such a pool for a couple of weeks.  Instead of needing to find a block on its own, my pool paid out whenever p2pool found a block.  I may revive it at some point, but there was almost no demand when I tried it.


Because people who don't know what they are talking about keep repeating it.  Soon the hardfork will take place, and p2pool will be compatible with all ASICs.  Now is the time to break this meme.


Maybe it is because people talk with confidence about things they don't full understand.  This leaves the uneducated with false belief, which they continue to repeat.  When you hear the same lie repeated 50 times because everybody takes hearsay as fact, it gets annoying.

Reading more about the p2pool I have to say it does appear to be a very good solution to decentralisation.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool

The issue is - it is far more complex than mining at a traditional pool.

Network latency plays a big part in how efficiently you mine which is not such an issue for normal mining pools.

You need to install the p2pool node software either on your miner or on a dedicated machine.

Bitcoin-qt / bitcoind has to be installed and the full block chain downloaded. This then needs to be monitored to make sure it is up and running as if your were solo mining.

The share difficulty is much higher therefore there is a greater variance in your earnings which is one of the reasons miners go to pools that use the pay per share payment model.


The above quote is immediately going to discourage people.

After reading through that wiki page I can say that a huge number of people are going to have trouble understanding it and wonder why it is worth the effort.

Only dedicated people that understand the importance of decentralisation and have a good understanding of diagnosing network problems will take it on but this is very small percentage of miners.

It has to be looked at from the layman's perspective - it is far simpler to use a traditional mining pool and does not require any real technical expertise or understanding and you are far less likely to have an issue with stale shares, payment variance, mining efficiency, setting up long polls and the other issues that go with it.

When you see questions being posted asking what host do they need for their ASIC miner - you know at that point they are looking for the easiest possible way to generate bitcoins and are not interested in the ethos of the coin. They want to run them from a host that uses as little power as possible to maximise their profit. If you told them they have to run a PC to host the bitcoin-qt and the p2pool software the first thought will be why bother when I can use a mining pool and not have to do any of that. Have a look through the BFL forum and you will see where I am coming from.

For the p2pool to really succeed it needs to be as easy to use as the traditional mining pools otherwise people will not make the effort to switch.

After having a look at this chart http://p2pool.info/ there was an increase in the number of users from April to the middle of May but from there it has been in a steady decline even though the hash rate has increased. This is indicative of a hardcore group of users that have just been increasing their hash rate and not a growth in the user base or popularity.

I would like something explained - what is stopping you submitting the same share to the p2pnode and your bitcoin-qt client at the same time? (I am assuming that it is actually your bictoin-qt client that is providing the getwork response to the p2pnode sofware that then forwards it to your miner).You can easily write a proxy point your miner at that and this just duplicates and submits the same share to two different address simultaneously. If it was of valid difficulty the chances are the bitcoin-qt client would receive it first as a direct submission than through the p2pnode and then to the bitcoin-qt client. This does not work with mining pools because of the Merkle tree being different for 2 different bitcoin-qt servers and the share is immediately rejected.

The issue is when you search to see if they work the first results say they don't - What percentage of people are going to keep looking? If they already mining at 100% on an existing pool why are they going to take the risk?

Nobody is going to read through 300 pages of posts - only people that have been closely following that thread will.

After having a look through it is not clear what is going on with the BFL devices. When the guy who wrote cgminer is saying there is a problem what conclusion do you expect people to come to. It looks like the 5ghs devices work but not the bigger units.

To quote ckolivas the author of cgminer


Avalon's as you say also have a problem

So at the moment it is only the USB miners and the BFL low ghs units that appear to work. So in essence no big miners are going to use it.

I also don't understand why so many people on this forum immediately attack each other - anyone that is not involved in Bitcoins is going to be reluctant to join or even post due to all the demeaning comments that are fired at you when you misunderstand something - which would will be the majority of new users.

You guys need to be more patient and just explain why something may be incorrect.

Agreed. The Tragedy of Commons - one of the thorns of the free market.

Please stop spreading this lie.  The issue with p2pool is people who might try it are actively discouraged by uninformed people like you. ASICMINER hw works, BFL hw works, and soon Avalon hw will work.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/a-guide-for-mining-efficiently-on-p2pool-includes-fud-repellent-and-faq-153232:

Additionally, with the upcoming hardfork (code released, waiting on 95% of hashpower to upgrade), p2pool should work reasonably well for all ASICs (including Avalon), and optimally for most.  Even without the hardfork, I'm mining away with 61 AM USBs with 111% efficiency.

One could adjust the difficulty every block without any complex mathematics or issues with synchronizing times. Now mining is random we only know the time of the average block which is 10 minutes however each individual blocks time to a solution will fall into a bell curved (visualize a bell curve with peak at 10 minutes and a standard deviation of 10 minutes).   If you simply looked at the last block the difficulty adjustment would just be tracking the normal random walk of bitcoin solution times.  Bitcoin "solves" that by looking at a 2016 block window and adjusting it every 2016 blocks.  However it isn't required that the adjustment interval and the averaging interval be the same.

For example a CC could look at time for last 2016 blocks to get the average time per block (and thus the necessary change in difficulty) but do that every block.

For example:
for block 2017 the difficulty is computed by looking at the time interval from block 1 to block 2016
for block 2018 the difficulty is computed by looking at the time interval from block 2 to block 2017
for block 2019 the difficulty is computed by looking at the time interval from block 2 to block 2018
...

And as was pointed out, there is a large variation in the "time to solve", but perhaps if the 2 weeks to adjust were modified to something akin to a Kalman filter, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter
one might be able to shorten the "time to change the difficulty" to a very short window?

I see times to solve of one minute or less to over 30 minutes regularly, just watching
http://blockchain.info/

I don't know what the average is but I would imagine that the code might be able to "Kalman filter" the difficulty "on the fly", i.e. every block if the block was solved in less than 10 minutes, and at the 10 minuute mark if no solution arrives. One would hope that the mean time to solution wouldn't "hunt" or wildly oscillate, but would damp down quickly.

This would then be able to correct for large swing in network hashing power very quickly.

The only issue, other than actually writing and testing the code, would be how to synchronise all the bitcoinds and bitcoinqts that will calculate a new difficulty on their bitcoin clocks and the last blocks time. I don't know what happens now at the two week magic moment, or is it a block count number? Changing the difficulty "mid block" would seem to be similar to a new best block kind of signal to those who are mining. If a miner solves first at a higher difficulty than the "corrected" difficulty, so what? It's still valid, it would seem to me.

Just idle thoughts from a old coder that would like to see BTC's ranks swell by making the windows version (bitcoin-qt.exe) more palatable to the masses, that are not geeks. I would like bitcoin-qt to be everything it still is, but look more like http://blockchain.info/, i.e. show the liveliness  of the BTC network. It doesn't have to be musical, though it could be, like http://www.listentobitcoin.com/

I sometimes run a modified version of bitcoind in -printtoconsole mode, where the printf()s are "corrected" to a DOS <=80 character length, or other tricks with \r & \n. It is interesting to watch bitcoind side by side with http://blockchain.info/ and see them both showing the transactions as they are coming in, and the new blocks.

Now if I could capture that and display it in bitcoin-qt...?

I'm the one who offered the splash screen change to try and keep it on "top" and animate it a little during the long VerifyDB() time, and the move the wallet.dat file anywhere change.

Ron

If you don't count my mining from May 2011 to June 2013, then yes, I never mined.


Thank you for sort of proving my point that pools come and go, and their power changes with the miner's changing whims. Deepbit, Eclipse, and Eligius used to be really big pools. 50BTC didn't even exist until somewhat recently, and many other pools there are very new, too. Miners control hashing power, not pools, and if the top 15 on that list are taken down, or do something scammy, the bottom 5, or any new ones, will take their place as the top mining pools. And by the way, since pools go down all the time, it's customary for miners to set their mining software to switch to other pools, or solo-mine, when they lose a connection to a pool. So, if some pool is taken down suddenly, Bitcoin users probably won't even notice a change in confirmation times.


I do, you don't. Pools START by not solving any blocks, and trying to entice miners to join them. It costs almost nothing to run a pool, until you get a lot of connections and mining power pointed at you, so these pools could run indefinitely, waiting for miners to join.


Totally wrong, so I'll explain it to you. The clients/nodes do the work of verifying transactions to make sure they are following all the rules. Clients make sure that coins that were recorded in the blockchain are not double-spent, that coins are legit and not created out of thin air, that coins are following correct difficulty requirements, and that there are no more than 21M coins. If a transaction is sent that breaks any of those rules, it is the clients that reject it and stop it from propagating on the network before miners even hear about it. Miners just verify the transactions same as clients, and store it in a safe database. So if miners change some fundamental rule, such as mining strange transactions, or trying to increase the coin limit, their blocks will be rejected by all the clients, and their mined coins will be useless.


Check the date. That's an article from a year ago. P2Pool has been patched and upgraded many times since then, now supports Stratum, and can be used with Avalon and BFL (though Avalon is still buggy).

Maybe you should educate yourself first - read what people say who actually mine bitcoins

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/is-it-worth-it-to-get-usb-miner-245772

And you will see the conclusive answer is no.

There are multiple issues that need to be discussed.

There is nothing backing FIAT accept peoples faith in it - exactly the same as Bitcoins - they are backed by nothing but peoples faith.

The upper limit of bitcoins can be changed. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/is-the-21-million-bitcoin-limit-unchangeable-153330

The point I am making is there are some issues with Bitcoin that need to be discussed.

When you are mining there is this thing called "work time" which tells you how long since the last block was solved on the Network - if you actually mined you would know that is easy to identify when ASICminer is having issues as you would see this value increase dramatically.

There is nothing wrong with the maths - if you actually read my post it said -


ASICMiner and another big mining pool is the key thing here so the real problem is people just do not read the posts

You obviously have never mined a bitcoin in your life.

OK Rassah what is the total number of bitcoin mining pools?

Well here is a list of the top 20 pools

1   BTC Guild   424 (21.03%)
2    ASICMiner   366 (18.15%)
3   50 BTC   324 (16.07%)
4   slush - mining.bitcoin.cz   230 (11.41%)
5   Eligius   73 (3.62%)
5   Bitminter   73 (3.62%)
7   Eclipse Mining pool   71 (3.52%)
8    Discus Fish   54 (2.68%)
9   ozcoin   36 (1.79%)
10   Horrible Horrendous Terrible Tremendous Mining Pool   31 (1.54%)
11   Deepbit   21 (1.04%)
12   Bitparking Merged Mining Pool   19 (0.94%)
12    ST Mining Corp   19 (0.94%)
14   Polmine   15 (0.74%)
15   p2pool   8 (0.40%)
16   btcmp.com   5 (0.25%)
17   Ecki   3 (0.15%)
17   Triplemining   3 (0.15%)
19   MaxBTC   2 (0.10%)
20   BTCmine.com   1 (0.05%)

http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/top.php

Please note to get into this list you only have to solve 1 block that is how few bitcoin mining pools are left.

So where are all these other pools that you keep talking about?

BTCMine.com has now dropped to 90gh/s when these pools are no longer solving blocks they will close down - do you UNDERSTAND this.


You did not state what the difference is because you can not is why. All the clients do is relay transactions - they do not process transactions or generate coins so you do not understand a massive aspect of Bitcoins - The miners are the most important aspect of bitcoins.

The issue with p2ppool is ASIC miners will not work on them

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/will-the-new-bfl-sc-asic-units-work-with-p2pool-90658

Rovchris, please stop being a whiny bitch. Pools are not central mining powerhouses. If one goes does, all miners will switch to another one. If the second and third go down, they will solo mine. This is typically set by default in mining software. There are plenty of smaller pools that aren't going anywhere, that will become large pools should the larger ones are taken down. For example, Eligius used to be a really big pool, but people quit it for personal reasons. Other small pools became big instead. Worst case scenario, there's always P2Pool. You can't take that down.
Also, if you have to ask what is the difference between a central bank money creating monopoly, and a centralized mining operation, then you really don't understand an enormously important aspect of Bitcoin. It has to do with clients, not miners.

you are a bit scatter on logic so it is tough to pull back your targets and then show you why you are missing.

Central Banks create fiat with nothing backing it to prevent inflation on their whim. Then they adjust interest rates and also have a huge hand in velocity. That is nothing like you are comparing to someone who goes and mines most of the gold out of a finite amount

You then jump to the transaction times..  I see values all over the place with people rejecting your math about asicminer going offline. 
 

Ok then please explain to me in simple terms what the difference is between Central Banks having a monopoly on creating money and a few large corporations / companies controlling the Bitcoin money supply?

Read some of the stuff Satoshi has said about why he created Bitcoins in the first place.

It is not about easy money for miners it was about redressing the balance and removing the levers of money creation away from government and banks and everyone here is happy to just hand it straight over to corporations. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.

Well from reading information on your website that you were the CEO of

https://fastcash4bitcoins.com/index.aspx

Your business was closed down by the "The Virginia Corporation Commission" so there is one to add to your list.



What kind of response is that? When you are generating 3600 bitcoins a day and have a 1/4 of the entire Global network you have a responsibility to maintain it. I do not see why you do not understand this.

This is exactly what existing financial institutions do and respectable businesses.


The USA Government is not the only one that would act against bitcoins any government will when they realise they are loosing control of the money supply - Do you think they are just going to say oh well it was good while it lasted?