Topic: Windows wallet: compile under UNIX or Windows? (Read 3173 times)

Agreed in some aspects but actually a lot of altcoins that you see these days have the built-in miner edited out but you can still use standalone miners to solo mine, you'd be crazy to use the built-in ones anyway

The main problem isn't really the miner itself (if you run your own private blockchain, the diff should be low, since you're the only one mining, so cpu, gpu or asic should all be sufficient). The main problem is that you're cloning coins that are old (like bitcoin and litecoin). The developers of these coins removed a lot of code that was no longer usefull because these coins have such a high hashrate it is no longer feasible to do solo mining, or start mining from your wallet (setgenerate true) or from your node (gen=1).

If you end up cloning a mature coin, it is pretty hard to solo mine the first blocks, since things like getwork and even stratum were long removed from the sourcecode of your mature source coin... So if you want to solomine a coin that is cloned from such a mature coin, you basically have to set up a complete pool, otherwise it will not work.

Interesting. That seems indeed like the biggest problem. Is there a walkthrough of these nodes, or is it pretty straightforward? Also with moving the chain you mean constant block updates right?

Is an X11 miner really necessary for that? Isn't there a way to lower the difficulty?

AFAIK, all guides completely describing the clone process are long outdates, and TBH, i'm happy about this. If you see the sheer amount of clonecoins hitting the market, it might be a good thing if such guides aren't rewritten to use with more recent versions of sourcecode.

I cloned a coin for my personal education in the past (an old version of Litecoin IIRC), the cloning and compiling process wasn't that hard to figure out tbh... Basically boiled down to changing the name of the coin, the ports, removing the checkpoints, edit the nonce and timestamp parameters and generating a genesis block.
What is actually pretty hard is to start the chain. You have to start up  nodes and connect them, then you have to start mining on one of them...

I lost my early cloning attempts a while back.

I actually re-tried to clone DASH a while ago in order to prove to anybody that cloning a coin is pretty easy, so they should not buy in to the newest ICO premine... However, i ran into problems getting my chain moving.
I started up 2 nodes pointing to eachother (so far so good) and added gen=1 to one of their config's... However, they did not start to mine, they just waited.
I guess the sollution would have been to start one of the nodes pointing eachother while accepting json-rpc connections, then fire up a stratum proxy, then connect an X11 cpu miner using this stratum proxy to start mining on one of the two nodes... However, i wasn't in a mood to do this, so i had succesfully cloned DASH, but i was unable to get my chain moving...

Is this the complete guide for setting up and cloning the coin aswell using gitian, or am i missing something? Do you have any walk throughs of that too?

That setup should be sufficient... However, the first setup will take a while, but you only have to do this setup one time


https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tree/master/contrib/gitian-descriptors
https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/tree/master/contrib/gitian-descriptors
https://github.com/dashpay/dash/tree/master/contrib/gitian-descriptors

Where is this walk through?

Ok thank you i will give it a try.
Do you think a 1x2 core 4gb ram linux machine is good enough? Or does it need more? Can you share your experiences? I also dont want to waste sever hours on setting up the deps/environment.

Yes, i've compiled using mingw in the past. I personally found crosscompiling using gitian much easyer.
Debian will also work, but the first time i'd just suggest following the walktrough.

So you suggest to compile the windows wallet under linux useing gitian? Did i understand that right?
Never used gitian. Is it similiar to setting up myngw on windows?

edit:
Just saw you suggested to use ubuntu. Is debian also working? I've heard that some coins require ubuntu to be able to be compiled without changeing much on the deps/source.

I'd rather point you directly to the github repo of the coin in question

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tree/master/contrib/gitian-descriptors
https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/tree/master/contrib/gitian-descriptors
https://github.com/dashpay/dash/tree/master/contrib/gitian-descriptors
...

There were some better tutorials out there, but last time i just followed the howto directly from the bitcoin github repo and i got everything up and running in a very short time...
If it's the first time you do a gitian build, i'd recommend following the tutorial to the letter (including the same virtualbox, debian,... versions).

To answer your second question: i would recommand running debian or ubuntu on a VM, like you said

Good luck!

Is this tutorial still up-to-date?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.514312

Or is there a newer version somewhere?

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i should install Gitian on a VM, on Ubuntu?

If you use the gitian method, you do have to realise the gitian descriptors for windows, linux and mac are different... So to build a wallet for both linux, windows and mac, you'll have to start the build process 3 times... However, all initial setup can be re-used for compiling those wallets (in other words, the setup has to be done once, but the build process on this setup has to be repeated for each OS)

Wow so many replys and seems like most of you think that compileing is best under linux.
I was following a guide here on bitcointalk and used the good description in the wallet and created the QT under windows 10. It still took about 1,5-2h for setting up all the dependencies etc.
Under linux you could easly completely perform a fresh install, includeing the gui wallet for linux ^^

It was always like that. There is no shortcut here.
I don't compile my wallets, its too complicated/too time consuming.
Don't waste ur time, all u can do is to check signatures of binary version.

In general, compiling on Linux is much more straightforward than compiling on windows.

At least in my experience.

Windows is more fun though! 

I Guess i'll try gitian first then.
I'll just follow the tutorial from coinaxis, and play around with it for a little, and see how it goes.

Alot of people are recommending gitian, so i should surely check it out. Thanks.

Compiling on Windows is definitely a pain and also requires a ton of extra packages installed that I wouldn't need on my system. Compiling in a VM does sound like a preferable approach. Hadn't head of gitian before but it does look like it would be a pretty good method once you get it set up. Their site even provided a sample Bitcoin build process which is pretty neat.

If gitian descriptors are available, i find this to be the easyest way of compiling wallets for linux (32/64bit) + windows (32/64bit) + mac (in case you have the SDK available)

The complete setup of a gitian VM + the initial setup + documenting the procedure will set you back 3-4 hours, from then on, the compilation time will probably depend on your resources, but it won't take long to compile a wallet...

I am trying to compile a wallet with windows right now, using Mingw, but, but it is already a pain-in-the-ass, random errors and missing files... I will probably just make a VM with linux, and just use and compile it there. I must agree that it is so much is easier to compile with Linux, in comparison with Windows.



Could be that he is developing an altcoin, or just playing around with these wallets, which is what i am doing aswell. It's quite interesting to see how it all works.