Topic: Stratum protocol discussion - page 3. (Read 9111 times)

Quote from: gmaxwell on April 05, 2014, 02:46:45 AM

2013 Feb, after discussion, mining.subscribe was extended to take 2 arguments, so now it's mining.subscribe(String useragent, sessionid) where sessionid is optional, but if provided must match a previous session's mining.notify subscription id. If the server allows resuming a session, it will give you back the same subscription id and extranonce information.

BFGMiner (at least) will also send mining.suggest_target("hex target") upon connection, if the user has a preferred target.

This post should have been on the other side of the split.

Luke-Jr

legendary

Activity: 2576

Merit: 1186

Quote from: ckolivas

Here we go again :-

Let the undocumented stuff coexist, it's rather unimportant anyway since most pools couldn't care less what the miner wants.

+1, suggest splitting side-discussion off to leave the thread to just the documentation posts.

kano

legendary

Activity: 4466

Merit: 1798

Linux since 1997 RedHat 4

From a protocol development perspective, stratum being defined in terms of difficulty is an embarrassing flaw of the sort that would have been avoided if it hadn't been developed behind closed doors.
...

It wasn't developed behind closed doors, you are just regurgitating a lie spread by Luke.

gmaxwell

staff

Activity: 4158

Merit: 8382

From a protocol development perspective, stratum being defined in terms of difficulty is an embarrassing flaw of the sort that would have been avoided if it hadn't been developed behind closed doors. ... The fact that it's a floating point value which cannot precisely specify the actual values used in bitcoin is a pretty big facepalm. All of this really should have been using bits like the bitcoin protocol does both for precision and consistency sake (or an expanded target— to accommodate legacy stupidity, but then again people will just get the byte order confused and complain it wastes bandwidth.

).

In any case, should have beens aside— what am I missing here? There is no formal specification for stratum at all, slush was apparently sucked into Trezor land before publishing it. AFAICT nothing is implementing the difficulty based message that was suggested way in the past, but at least luke's stuff has implemented the target based approach. Whats to debate?

-ck

legendary

Activity: 4018

Merit: 1622

Ruu \o/

Quote from: kano on April 05, 2014, 01:09:30 AM

BFGMiner (at least) will also send mining.suggest_target("hex target") upon connection, if the user has a preferred target.

Why would it do this?
There is already mining.suggest_difficulty(difficulty)

No, there isn't. Nothing implements this, and it isn't documented anywhere.

Using a target fixes the inherent problems with using difficulty as a Number:

There is no agreement over which difficulty measurement is to be used. The official spec says bdiff; BTCGuild uses pdiff; various scrypt pools use Ldiff
Some common targets (such as pdiff 1) cannot be accurately conveyed without huge data sizes
Implementing conversion to/from difficulty accurately requires a bignum library, so often (eg, *gminer) it is just approximated.

Seems like a valid concern to me since it was described over a year ago and yours isn't documented anywhere except as part of your code. Of course you're free to implement whatever you want on top of stratum. Cgminer happily works with any arbitrary diffs and does not have problems with the accuracy of the shares it returns in response, using true diff 1 as the base for all stratum operations. I wasn't aware there was any controversy about the move to true diff1; that old simplification only affected getwork. Since work in stratum is even defined in terms of difficulty, it makes even less sense to then request a difficulty as a target. I don't see a problem with you using it for your software and your pool but I can't see why it should be seen as part of the stratum spec.

Luke-Jr

legendary

Activity: 2576

Merit: 1186

Quote from: Luke-Jr on April 05, 2014, 01:06:11 AM

Quote from: kano on April 05, 2014, 01:04:51 AM

Quote from: Luke-Jr on April 05, 2014, 01:06:11 AM

BFGMiner (at least) will also send mining.suggest_target("hex target") upon connection, if the user has a preferred target.

Why would it do this?
There is already mining.suggest_difficulty(difficulty)

No, there isn't. Nothing implements this, and it isn't documented anywhere.

If you say something that contradicts facts in front of your face, oddly enough, that just makes you look foolish.
Try a little sense in your posts.

One of the posts above, shows where it was documented, over a year ago:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1543341

Forum posts are not documentation.

You've been flipping too many burgers at McDonalds - it's softening your brain and you are forgetting things:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1543185

But I guess that's to be expected.

Hard to see how I forget something I never read in the first place.
I don't see anything relevant there anyway. Con agreed to implement slush's spec and then never did. How is this relevant?

kano

legendary

Activity: 4466

Merit: 1798

Linux since 1997 RedHat 4

Quote from: kano on April 05, 2014, 01:04:51 AM

Quote from: kano on April 05, 2014, 01:04:51 AM

BFGMiner (at least) will also send mining.suggest_target("hex target") upon connection, if the user has a preferred target.

Why would it do this?
There is already mining.suggest_difficulty(difficulty)

No, there isn't. Nothing implements this, and it isn't documented anywhere.

If you say something that contradicts facts in front of your face, oddly enough, that just makes you look foolish.
Try a little sense in your posts.

One of the posts above, shows where it was documented, over a year ago:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1543341

Forum posts are not documentation.

You've been flipping too many burgers at McDonalds - it's softening your brain and you are forgetting things:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1543185

But I guess that's to be expected.

Luke-Jr

legendary

Activity: 2576

Merit: 1186

BFGMiner (at least) will also send mining.suggest_target("hex target") upon connection, if the user has a preferred target.

Why would it do this?
There is already mining.suggest_difficulty(difficulty)

No, there isn't. Nothing implements this, and it isn't documented anywhere.

If you say something that contradicts facts in front of your face, oddly enough, that just makes you look foolish.
Try a little sense in your posts.

One of the posts above, shows where it was documented, over a year ago:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1543341

Forum posts are not documentation.

kano

legendary

Activity: 4466

Merit: 1798

Linux since 1997 RedHat 4

BFGMiner (at least) will also send mining.suggest_target("hex target") upon connection, if the user has a preferred target.

Why would it do this?
There is already mining.suggest_difficulty(difficulty)

No, there isn't. Nothing implements this, and it isn't documented anywhere.

If you say something that contradicts facts in front of your face, oddly enough, that just makes you look foolish.
Try a little sense in your posts.

One of the posts above, shows where it was documented, over a year ago:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1543341

Edit: and of course on the same page:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1543185

CaptEmulation

full member

Activity: 134

Merit: 100

Let me be the first to say thank you first designing, implementing and now collecting this information for all. Much more concise reading than https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=108533.660 or what else I've found on the pools pages.

Luke-Jr

legendary

Activity: 2576

Merit: 1186

BFGMiner (at least) will also send mining.suggest_target("hex target") upon connection, if the user has a preferred target.

Why would it do this?
There is already mining.suggest_difficulty(difficulty)

No, there isn't. Nothing implements this, and it isn't documented anywhere.

Using a target fixes the inherent problems with using difficulty as a Number:

There is no agreement over which difficulty measurement is to be used. The official spec says bdiff; BTCGuild uses pdiff; various scrypt pools use Ldiff
Some common targets (such as pdiff 1) cannot be accurately conveyed without huge data sizes
Implementing conversion to/from difficulty accurately requires a bignum library, so often (eg, *gminer) it is just approximated.

kano

legendary

Activity: 4466

Merit: 1798

Linux since 1997 RedHat 4