Topic: WTF is this? Someone found a trick for fast mining? - page 6. (Read 15846 times)

Even if there was some way to boost the mining algorithm by some large percentage, at most if would provide a temporary advantage to someone or some group.  Difficulty would quickly adjust, and others would discover this "secret."  This has been discussed previously too.  ;-)

You are correct that the switch from CPU to GPU was not a threat to security.  Particularly since GPUs were widely available and could be switched relatively quickly.  Satoshi attempted to encourage people (with a "gentleman's agreement") to stick with CPUs for as long as possible to encourage the ease of adoption by more people.  It was easier to get mining on a CPU than a GPU.  During that time at various points there would be people doing some GPU mining, and eventually everyone had to switch to remain in the mining game, but it didn't impact security significantly.

Hiding what this temporary advantage is - if you think that is what is going on here - is only helping this party who knows of this purported boost to the mining algorithm.  I say "purported" because significant claims require significant proof.

Are you referring to your message to me 45 minutes ago?  You provided no information that wasn't in the thread; and I responded asking you to provide information (either privately or publicly, though I encouraged you to provide it in public.).

I and multiple others have explained to you multiple times now that various mining devices consider only subsets of nonces for completely boring reasons--; what isn't explained is why you keep alleging that something with a boring explanation which has been provided multiple times hasn't been explained.

A few week ago you were making posts that demonstrated that you had no idea how mining worked at all and were not willing or able to do even the most basic research on the subject.  Your posts here continue to show a remarkable lack of basic research, yet you expect people to believe that you know something that hasn't been discussed in the hundreds of past threads about low level mining optimizations by experts in the field (including people like the inventor of hashcash; the general scheme used). Moreover, you started this by deceptively asking a question you later claimed to "know the answer to"; so I hope you can understand why people are skeptical here.

You're making serious claims that would be concerns for the security of Bitcoin if true; such claims demand serious substantiation... doubly so when they coming form a source which seems to have been clearly deceptive in this very thread and is obviously not very familiar with the subject.

In any case, you need do nothing more to defend your reputation than to simply explain what you're thinking.  If your ideas are wrong, they'll be corrected; if they're right but not news, old threads will be referenced, if they're new and concerning the issues will be addressed if possible, etc.   Right now, though, you're basically trying to convince us of something for which you'll give none of the information which could be used to support your claim. The only content in this thread will be people attacking your methods and motivations as a result, since you are intentionally refusing to provide the only information which could be used to analyze your claim directly.

It isn't a problem with translation.
"seems to indicate" and "suggests the possibility" are both completely different statements than:


We are dealing with probabilities here. You should never make such assumptions.


One should not assume that all three have malleable timestamps and than assume that they are grouped within 1 minute .

So than all your original concerns have been explained except a similar grouping on nonces , which we have also explained but you refuse to accept our answers without giving specific detailed refutations.

"seems to indicate" is the same as "suggests the possibility" in my poor english.

We already discussed that in previous posts. Timestamps in the blocks are malleable. Seems that block explorers are taking timestamps from the blocks. It is not the timestamp of the reception time of the blockexplorer since this would be incompatible with having the timestamp of block 354643 earlier than that of 354642. Just read above.

Take a look at the timestamps now....
Hora de Recepción    2015-05-02 13:11:28
Hora de Recepción    2015-05-02 13:12:17
Hora de Recepción    2015-05-02 13:02:15
Hora de Recepción    2015-05-02 12:24:26

Did you even bother to verify with a second blockchain explorer?

https://btc.blockr.io/block/info/354640      
    2015-05-02 06:24:26
https://btc.blockr.io/block/info/354641
    2015-05-02 07:02:15
https://btc.blockr.io/block/info/354642
2015-05-02 07:12:17
https://btc.blockr.io/block/info/354643
2015-05-02 07:11:28

NO, the last 3 blocks were not mined within 1 min.

Perhaps the problem is you make wild assumptions without carefully studying the evidence?

Gmaxwell never made that claim, all he did was suggest that is one possibility. Different ASICs also have similar or exactly the same parameters as well for the ranges and order in which nonces are searched for which makes your suggestion that we should assume the same hardware especially incorrect.

One should not assume the same miner or the same hardware like you claim. Look at the IP addresses, If anything the default assumption should be that they are 3 different miners. (Sure it might be possible it is one miner using multiple VPNs but that shouldn't be your default assumption)

It was the observation of gmaxwell because of the clustering of the nounces that seems to indicated similar miner or hardware. Ask him. Since the first block ins mined by AntPool and the others are anonymous, I assume that they use the same hardware. Otherwise we need to ask AntPool why they are anonymizing the next blocks if they are the miners.

It is also well known that a miner that mines a block has a higher probability of mining the next one since he can start mining in the time his block is propagating. Also there is a well known advantage in concealing mined blocks and releasing them altogether. This could indicate same miner.

I will be grateful if you avoid unnecessary ad hominem.

So far, you have only contributed by linking to a nice elementary number theoretical paper that has little to do with what we discuss.

~20% of the network hashing power is done by unknown miners. Why would you assume they are using all the same hardware? A complete non sequitur.

I just did that (sending a message to a developer), and as posted before I am willing to erase my posts here.

It is not about direct security of bitcoin. It is about boosting the mining algorithm. I don't think it is a direct threat to bitcoin security. Were the first GPU miners a threat to bitcoin security?

As for discussing this openly I prefer to wait for the answer of the developer. I don't want to be accused of spreading FUD or whatever.

This makes sense, although I understand that nounces are exhausted pretty kickly. I see no reason why they should restrict nounces. It requires more computation to change extranounces for example. Obviously I can accept that this is an implementation improvement of mining for which we do not have the precise details.


I also observe that the last 3 blocks are by anonymous miners. Thus if it is the same miner he is trying to conceal his identity, so we should assume that it is the same hardware. It is curious that suddenly the same hardware solves the block in such a short timeframe. It is of course possible.  Just inspecting mined blocks there is a high clustering of anonymous miners. It will be interesting to do a statistic on this also.

OK, judging from the clear lack of interest (he keeps denying the evidence yet doesn't even bother to digest the material) or refute the specific reasons why the evidence or reasons we provide are fallacious I am now more or less convinced he is disingenuous.




Bitcoin is an open source project where we openly discuss and share ideas. What you are doing by demanding explanations and evidence from us and than not reciprocating on what you claim to understand. This is rude at minimum and at worst an act of setting up a "secret" for some sort of investment scam.



valiron if you don't mind discussing this openly than just do so, If you are concerned about the security of bitcoin than email one of the core developers your secrets. If you won't do either , reframe from hinting at it in the first place.


Read this thread , it clearly goes over all the reasons you saw that behavior in your linked thread.

I've spotted same things before. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11136641
What's really happening, I really wanna know.

Still this doesn't provide a mathematical explanation of the clustering around 2^31.

I didn't read in detail the MAA paper, but I know exactly what you mean by refering to it. I also know that it doesn't explain the above clustering. If I get the time I will parse the blockchain and do some statistics on the nounces to determine their distribution.

I suspect as much as well, but to give Valiron the benefit of the doubt and for other lurkers to potentially learn something I will try explaining it as simply as possible.


The papers do explain biases towards certain numbers and why certain sets of numbers appear more often than other numbers and how these probabilistic biases can mislead you into drawing erroneous conclusions. Based upon the quickness of your reply you obviously didn't read the papers so I will provide a video for you to understand this principle-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UgZ5FqdYIQ

In the video the bias is created because the sampled numbers are not random but selected based upon our bias to start at 0 or 1 and work in a linear manner as humans.

The reason why the nonces produced aren't randomly uniform is because ASIC's search through random numbers in a linear and non random manner within certain ranges. There are many potential nonces that that could satisfy the block to hash given a specific difficulty but since asics search for these nonces in a linear fashion within a given range it greatly increases the probability that similar(contrasted to the potential range of possibilities of potential numbers) nonces will be found for each block.

This is further emphasized by the fact that there are now very large mining pools running most of the same exact hardware for most of their hashrate which has the exact same characteristics on how it searches for valid nonces. 

Sorry, I didn't mean any kind of misconduct or second intention. For the disclaimer I don't participate in active trading.

If you want I can edit and erase all hints at what I know (deleted). I don't mind discussing this openly, or if you prefer we can discuss it in a separate thread, but I don't think it is material to be exposed through posts in a forum. It would be better to discuss it in detail after a research paper is published. I am only interested in discussing the mathematical/computational aspects.

As said, I can edit and remove everything that could sound alarming. It is not my intention to spread any kind of FUD on bitcoin.

Because mining ASIC use "sea of hashers", they take one midstate work unit and broadcast it to hundreds (or even thousands) of SHA256 engines, each one tries a different nonce for the same work. You only have a finite number of engines so only a subset of nonces will get used, also some engines will fail (sometimes the same engine on every chip of a particular make) adding additional gaps. The allocation schemes differ from device to device (e.g. some hardware only produces even nonces or multiple of 64 nonces, some hardware only produces nonces in  a range 0-1024, etc.) There is also an optimization you can do where you actually hardwire the engines for given nonces and grind the first half, though I don't know if anyone bothers with it.

Same miner or similar hardware, perhaps-- sure? and so what? Its not uncommon for a large miner (or a hardware type with a large share of the hashrate) to find four blocks consecutively; there is effectively a calculator for that in the bitcoin whitepaper.

FWIW, I think Valiron is engaging in misconduct here. At first there is an "innocent" observational question and then after people point out that the observation is expected (because of hardware that only uses a limited set of nonces, and because of the block soft-target maximum) he had adopted a position of "secret knowing" that substantiates his position and yet he will not explain it.

Of course, it's possible for someone to be innocently ignorant, even likely (especially considering Valiron's posting history; there are plenty of optimizations you could be unaware of, or structure about mining that lay people misunderstand that could be mistaken as some advantage)-- but there is no reason to play secrecy games there, and secrecy is actively poisonous to having your understanding elaborated.  Likewise, it's possible to actually know secrets, but then you don't go hinting about them on the forum.  One possible way gain from the pattern of posts here would to manipulate the market with FUD about the security of the hashing algorithm, another would be to try to scam greedy buyer into buying these "premining" secrets; so these are my working theories, and I've negatively rated valiron accordingly.

(I'd debated instead locking the thread; as a thread of "Oh whats this" "its that" "oh no its not, it's something else but I won't tell you" "we told you its this" "bad math bad math" isn't a good use of the forum;  but I thought giving a chance for a correction would be more useful).

Can you explain the mathematical reason why nounces produced by ASICs are not uniform? The references you provide obviously do not explain that (nice paper by the way).

Also, the point here is that the distribution around 2^31 may be not uniform. Any mathematical reason for that?

From the pure hashing point of view, all nounces should have the same probability of success. If they appear with a non-uniform distribution is because the mining algorithm do not treat all of them equally, which is quite possible but must have a mathematical reason behind.


Anyway, the fact that all 4 blocks have a nounce close to 2^31 is more evidence that they were mined by the same miner. There are many other nounces that are not nearby 2^31. Too many similarities between the numbers of the 4 blocks...