Author

Topic: Can next bitcoin client limit hash/sec? (Read 1665 times)

legendary
Activity: 1072
Merit: 1181
May 15, 2011, 11:58:35 AM
#6
All nodes in the network - even those who are not lookin to generate new blocks - are verifying all transactions and blocks generated by others. This on itself is beneficial for the network (especially if you have a lot of connections).

Generating blocks is only as good as the (average) number of blocks generated. If a node would try one 1 khash per second, it will generate 1/2144027 of a block per year. Sorry, that's pointless.

The current network hashing speed is estimated around 1.8 Thash/s. It requires around 50000 normal desktop systems (4 Mhash/s each) to get a 10% share of this number. The same can be accomplished with 300 high-end graphic cards. Doing it with anything else, is just a waste of electricity.
full member
Activity: 125
Merit: 100
Quote
Isn't the whole point of bitcoin to get a lot of computers to verify the transactions?

Having your CPU hash with the goal of generating a block doesn't confirm the transactions or help the network confirm them at this point. (Unless you get reaaaalllly lucky.)
Your machine will still do all the hashes necessary to confirm a transaction/block whether or not you have the generate option turned on.
hero member
Activity: 812
Merit: 1022
No Maps for These Territories
I have a pending pull request for m0mchil's miner to do exactly this, it adds a "-s " option to reduce load on GPU/CPU when running the miner while doing other stuff:

https://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm/pull/10

It sleeps a fixed amount per frame, so you have to play with the sleep value a bit if you want to approximate a fixed nr of mhash/sec.

The built-in miner will never support this because it is already too slow to be of any use anyway, so it was removed.
hero member
Activity: 755
Merit: 515
Quite the opposite, not having a Generate coins option keeps noobs from constantly complaining that they haven't gotten any coins and have been "mining" for a month.  Limiting khash is absolutely possible, but it should be done on the miner side.
hero member
Activity: 755
Merit: 515
Thats up to the miner, the in-built miner is moving towards miner removal (its already gone in GUI), though I kind of doubt it will be fully removed for a long time (if at all), no one will be adding more features to the miner in the client.
sr. member
Activity: 560
Merit: 250
Bounty manager (https://t.me/Gudwinn)
With the next version of bitcoin client I would like to limit the hash/sec to a trickle or what ever limit I want.

Please help me gain support for this feature.

Thanks.

Groc
Jump to: