Topic: Gridcoin (GRC) - first coin utilizing BOINC - Official Thread - page 276. (Read 597476 times)

Hey all,

I found gridcoin tonight, after having talked about this very need for a boinc coin last week with a buddy Yay!

I just set poolmining to true, and restarted the wallet while cudaminer worked in the background.
What happens to the work done over the last few hours? Does it get tossed?

Been reading the whole thread while waiting for my newbie status to pass. Lots of great info.

Now I have a question for the devs Is it possible to buy gridcoins directly from the devs to support things like the logo art, website design, beer and pizza?

I have $50 with your names on it   

Hi WillBit,


There is no marketplace yet ... will be added in the future (soon I hope).

Where can I buy Gridcoin at?

Can you help me a bit Andrew ? Rob doesn't seem to be answering for now,

Exactly.
Although NVIDIA cards are available without a problem. Which is great, but not for mining.

Andrew.

Lately I was looking on amazon and ebay and to my surpirse there was not much available in terms of GPUs.

As Rob said, it is a new feature.. I'm sure in the end it will be even easier to set up than GPU mining.
I finally have the setup for my rig, however the cards I want to buy are hopelessly sold out...so I will have to wait for 2 weeks before they arrive.
That's why I'm eager to start CPU mining

Andrew.

Hi,

Thanks for clearing everything out. I'm just trying to understand how it all works.
The CPU mining and payout systems actually make perfect sense when you explain it.

Right, so if #of users < 576 then max payout per address=150, meaning if somone wants to generate more money, they would need to have different GRC address on each machine...however when #users > 576 and the Pool2 coin cap is reached(576*150) then it will be switched to the 576*150/#users*RBPPS formula and the same user would need to switch all machines to one address in order to generate as much BOINC credits as possible because their GRC payout will be mainly dependant on them.
Basically in the end, both of these approaches will generate the same amout of work for BOINC which is very good..the only difference will be in the payout for the early miners.

Also regarding the beacon etc.:
1. The beacon for one address needs to really be sent out only once so the system recognizes the miner, right? If I would shutdown the pc and start mining again tomorrow I wouldn't need to wait for another beacon before I'm listed..is it a sort of a registration, like when miners with GPUs first need to mine their own block before they are listed?
2. In order to keep CPU mining, there have to be running BOINC + Wallet + Mining Console on the machine..or is it just BOINC+Wallet? Guiminer can be shut down?

Not a problem, I'd like to help and not just ask questions
Thanks, you too,
Andrew.

Man GPU mining seems to be so much easier. LOL

Hi -- I realize it's a little convoluted, since we have a separate set of rules for cpuminers vs gpuminers. 

The Cpuminers payout structure is based 100% on the daily avg credits per boinc project summed, so if you have 1000 today for Malaria + 500 today for RNA, your pool2 entry for the day would be 1500 boinc shares for your single GRC address.  If you try to exploit that by opening up multiple GRC addresses your credits will go down on each account so you wont make any extra money.  Anyway, the reason the top of the listcpuminers report breaks out the credits by project is so the GPU miner can check those individually.  What happens is the GPU miners go down the list in the top section of the report and verify the credits (5 entries are in the report; so 5 checks are made by the gpu miner).  However, part II of the report consolidates the credits by GRC receiving address.  The user should technically be paid based on the outstanding owed for the day minus any previous payments by the pool when the next GPU user finds a block, over time.  We should add a section for the actual mechanics of the payout structure, ie how the shares affect the daily reward.

On a high level the original idea was to pay up to 576 cpu-only miners 150grc per day but using an RBPPS to arrive at a payment per miner based on their boincshares.  The max payment per day per receiving address is 150grc.  When more than 576 cpu-users participate, the pool total stays @ 576*150 (total), now divided by all participants  * RBPPS (boincshares per user).

We may have to start off with a smaller reward while we test this, more on that later after I check to see how we can even enable Pool2.

Thanks for writing the manual!

Have a good one,
Rob H.

Hi Rob,

Yes it works perfectly for me too since then.
Total credits for Malaria I have right now are 8884..not a lot, but it will definitely grow

Also I see that all your machines have different Project IDs so there are basically two options how to CPU mine:
1. Every machine that a user puts into CPU mining on a particular project can have its own BOINC account for that project(=different Project ID) and even if the user name(GRC address) will be same for all, the system will treat each machine as a new cpu miner instance in "listcpuminers" and BOINC credits/rewards etc. will be calculated for each one separately.
2. However if every machine that the users has CPU mining would have the same BOINC Project ID(only one account for all) then the BOINC credits will be summed up and ''listcpuminers'' will see this as a 1 miner.

Is that correct? Which solution would then be better for coin rewards?
Am I right in thinking that at the moment it is better to have the machines on separate Project IDs because the BOINC credits don't play that big of a role now, however in the future when there are a lot of miners the BOINC credits will play increasingly important role and it might be more efficient to have the machines on one Project ID to earn as much BOINC credits as possible?

Regards,
Andrew.

Hi Rob,

Ok just as I was writing a similar amount of credit appeared back into the wallet. Not sure if its the same. When I click on "Transactions" in the wallet it shows a big red square on the column to the left of "Date" column. Upon right clicking "Show transaction details" in the wallet it says -

"status: 0/offline, has not been successfully broadcast yet" and
"From: unknown" (along with transaction details.)

So something I am confused about is that - isn't the GRC to be credited with a minimum of 5 (+ depending on BOINC utilization ) ? I suppose the GRC I have are not there due to finding a block. Am I correct ? And if I am correct then it has already been more than a day easily since the miner has been running and no GRC yet ... is this normal (how long does it take?) ?

Also, one of the projects I have running is SETI , however it does not show up in the "Project Console" so that I can link my user id for the same(SETI) as you directed before.

Hi Andrew--

Yeah, I think I introduced that crash when we adding the charting boinc historical avg_credits using the background thread, and Ive been trying to find that - actively.  I think we finally fixed it by charting on the main thread and fixing the "red X" that would occasionally appear on the chart; all 4 of my machines have been up for 30 hours now, so I am hoping that problem is behind us.

Regarding the beacon, I see you in position #2.  Glad we were able to move the project along to this point.  What are your total credits for that project?  Ill look into what our next step is in enabling pool2; but not sure how long that is going to take.  

Rob H.

Hi Rob,

Apparently I got things to work and all of a sudden I got a balance of about 0.0000x gridcoins (a teeny weeny amount).. they were unconfirmed transactions. So I thought I should restart the wallet and leave it on. But when I restarted the wallet (which also meant that the miner would shut down) , it said "rescanning" at the bottom of the wallet while opening and now I cant see the GRC credit I recieved.

Can you tell me why this happened ?

Hi Rob,

just posting what's also on the other forum so it's up to date here too.

Finally the beacon was sent out, transaction has been confirmed by the network and ''listcpuminers'' already recognizes me..so everything works perfectly now.
Since last time we talked about the beacon sending, my wallet has crashed twice(which didn't happen before)..I suppose it might have been due to it trying to send the beacon(also I might be totally wrong ), however now since I updated to the latest version 4.77, the beacon went out and everything works fine and stable.

Today I'll try to create the CPU mining manual from what I know and post it..hope this will help.
 
Regards,
Andrew.

bump ... still no reply to my previous problems (which I am classifying by numbers so you can deal with them in a more organized manner).... things are getting from bad to worse ... read on

Problem 3: Password problem

Now my desktop hung up and would show a black screen (its a fresh install of windows 7 so I suspect its your software).
After hanging up i restarted it and opened Boinc Manager window (its already on autostart preference). To my surprise it started saying "You have an incorrect password". And it said "disconnected" at the bottom. Since I had not changed the password at all I decided to reboot it and check. Again to my surprise it worked fine just as before.

These are unexpected things happening while running gridcoin-qt!!


------------------>  You may want to solve your personal technical problems first.




Problem 4: Credits Problem

I have SETI and Rosetta running - SETI has completed 2 tasks while Rosetta has completed one.All the tasks show "ready to report" but Rosetta has granted credit while SETI has not granted any credit on their respective homepages. Why this discrepancy ?

You can see the images here to make things more clear http://imgur.com/iGUMZO6&a3D1ZBQ&Owu6U6B.

The Rosetta page is giving a "client error" on one of the tasks as is evident from the images. What is causing that ?


----------------->  The BOINC program and its errors should be taken up on the BOINC forums not on the Gridcoin forums!



Also it has been about a day since the desktop has been running and there are credits on the rosetta page which show that some work has been done. However I have not received any gridcoins yet. Are the two numbers (credits on the home page and gridcoins recieved) related in some way ?

Dont get me wrong, I am all for science (infact I used to run BOINC on my desktop a couple of years back too) but if we are to make gridcoin successful then we need better support. Or a generations' computing resources are just going to go to waste !!


-------------->  We may have to stop working on this CPU mining feature until it can be made easier to use.  Im personally not happy with the level of support required for the first 3 users .  Sorry, but this is a large, complicated project and unless we can make this a little easier to deal with, this part of it MAY need shelved.  But for now, we'll keep moving and see how our first 2 users fare in pool2.

Problem 1 :

I have done everything as you asked Andrew to do (since I am CPU mining as well) . However I am unlear by what you mean by "Gridcoin Projects maintenance page in the textbox"


------------->  From the wallet main page, click on "Projects".  The white textbox next to the project is the place you put in your boinc userid.



Problem 2 : GUI Miner missing

(From what I understand I cant CPU mine without GPU so this is a secondry but still an important step to make it more efficient.)

---------------------->  Gui miner should be the "scrypt alpha" version (not the sha version---- google GuiMiner Scrypt Alpha and youll find tacotimes thread on bitcointalk with the download).
Place it in your AppData directory (users~appdata\roaming\gridcoin) Not in your program files directory.


  File "wx\_core.pyo", line 11206, in Enable
PyAssertionError: C++ assertion "item" failed at ..\..\src\common\menucmn.cpp(841) in wxMenuBase::Enable(): wxMenu::Enable: no such item
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "guiminer.py", line 3094, in
  File "guiminer.py", line 3085, in run
  File "guiminer.py", line 2457, in __init__

------------------------->  If you are receiving guiminer errors, try to mine litecoin and diagnose the issue first then come back to gridcoin (after you figure our how to mine with scrypt).





All the best,
Rob Halford

Hi Oscyf--
- Are the wallet and boinc suffisant to mine or must we mine with cgminer too ?
      Wallet + Boinc=CPUMining; Feature still in beta.  Currently you need guiminer or reaper or cgminer

- I see Boinc processor power 100 but boinc khps 0 oO! Is it normal ?
     Yes, normal.  As long as "Boinc Block:" has a hex # in it your console is fine.

- I can't find myself in listminers but I'm registered in it ( I think ) getpoolminingmode gives : "PoolMiningMode=" : true
    You have to successfully mine a full block before listminers picks you up in the pool.



Good luck.
Rob H.

Just a few updates, and a very important message, and Ill try to answer the CPU mining questions asap.

1) Mac Client: Our Linux programmer has explained to me that he can handle the creation of the mac client.  The mac client depends on the Linux client.  The Linux client is currently back in development while we add the boinc security / cpuminer feature.  We'll start a thread for the progress on that.  So, mac client is not forgotten, it is behind the Linux version.

2) We are going to start enforcing the new boinchash starting with block 26150.  This should occur on Wednesday 12-4-2013 @ approximately 5PM CST.   Please upgrade your client before that date!!!!!! This is extremely important, because the older versions do not put all of the security information in the chain, and if you are running an older version (before version 25 in the mining screen), your blocks will not be accepted by anyone else on the network!  Therefore, you will not be able to mine!  So please upgrade now, and although we will have a new version available before that time, you will be able to type "upgrade" from the command line to get the latest before Wednesday.  I have been looking at the last 30 blocks, and I see approximately 33% of our network is still running the old version.  We should try to achieve 100% by Wednesday so miners aren't attempting to propogate bad blocks to the network.