It will also group together bounties by public key. When the 1Satoshi and 1satoshi bounties were both present, because they had the same public key, they would go into the same pattern set and would be searched for simultaneously. Also, when dealing with bounties with the same public key, the aggregate reward/difficulty is used for decision making. This would cause it to choose those two bounties together over the 1DaneiLRH bounty, if it were present.
Hmm, a pretty neat and smart thing to do with the aggregation of the public keys.
You mean for the -a parameter? It should accept a testnet address there. Did it not accept one for you? It is supposed to validate that what you enter for the -a parameter is a valid address of some sort, but it won't enforce a specific address type.
I suppose it didn't work last time I checked, but then again it might be just some hiccup on my computer.
So, unless someone else has some objections, I`ll send you the Bitcoins soon. What address would you like to receive them with? 1samr7UZxtC6MEAFHqr1h3Kq453xJJbe4 ?
That's the right address.
So, I`ve sent the bounty in this transaction:
http://blockexplorer.com/tx/40800a9f0c708295c03338d559ca6011efc2828ea9ab44f2aae8e4f46bcd317e#o1The total comes up to 12 Bitcoins, as there was a 2 Bitcoin donation to the bounty early on (
http://blockexplorer.com/address/1Cuw26gA2nhuqjBELwL6QGG89RsqfaV3v8).
Ideas looking forward
It's possible to make vanity address mining much like regular bitcoin mining, in the sense of tracking the total work completed by each participant, and possibly distributing rewards to all participants rather than just the finder. The idea would be, if somebody wants 1DanieLRH, post the bounty for 1Danie, and keep track of how many addresses each miner returns. Eventually, a matching address will come back, and all of the partial matches will make it possible to determine the division of compute resources.
It also wouldn't hurt if the pool posted the portion of the bounty that will go to whoever solves it, rather than the amount paid by the customer. It's a letdown to see a bounty for 0.1 BTC, and only receive 0.08 on completion.
I suppose the partial rewards would be possible, but could tax the pool a bit too much. It is running on Google App Engine which charges for each read/write operation. I guess if there is enough demand I can look into that.
And with the reward, yes, I suppose it would be more "human friendly" to display the actual reward that will be given to people. Sometimes being a programmer one forgets about the human aspect of things
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