Mining and difficulty
129 writings, oldest first
- Private email (Adam Back)
Citation of your Hashcash paper
I'm getting ready to release a paper that references your Hashcash paper and I wanted to make sure I have the citation right. Here's what I have: [5] A. Back, "Hashcash - a denial of service counter-measure,"…
- Private email (Adam Back)
RE: Citation of your Hashcash paper
Thanks, I wasn't aware of the b-money page, but my ideas start from exactly that point. I'll e-mail him to confirm the year of publication so I can credit him. The main thing my system adds is to also use proof-of-work to support a…
- Private email (Wei Dai)
Citation of your b-money page
I was very interested to read your b-money page. I'm getting ready to release a paper that expands on your ideas into a complete working system. Adam Back (hashcash.org) noticed the similarities and pointed me to your site. I need to find…
- bitcoin.org
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System Satoshi Nakamoto satoshin@gmx.com www.bitcoin.org Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party. The paper is available at: http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf The main properties: Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
Thanks for bringing up that point. I didn't really make that statement as strong as I could have. The requirement is that the good guys collectively have more CPU power than any single attacker. There would be many smaller zombie farms…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
Ray Dillinger: Increasing hardware speed is handled: "To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time, the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
Hal Finney wrote: Right, nodes keep transactions in their working set until they get into a block. If a transaction reaches 90% of nodes, then each time a new block is found, it has a 90% chance of being in it. That does not need to be…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
James A. Donald wrote: The proof-of-work chain is the solution to the synchronisation problem, and to knowing what the globally shared view is without having to trust anyone. A transaction will quickly propagate throughout the network, so…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
James A. Donald wrote: They both broadcast their blocks. All nodes receive them and keep both, but only work on the one they received first. We'll suppose exactly half received one first, half the other. In a short time, all the…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
James A. Donald wrote: If you're having trouble with the inflation issue, it's easy to tweak it for transaction fees instead. It's as simple as this: let the output value from any transaction be 1 cent less than the input value. Either…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
James A. Donald wrote: When there are multiple double-spent versions of the same transaction, one and only one will become valid. The receiver of a payment must wait an hour or so before believing that it's valid. The network will resolve…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
James A. Donald wrote: The proof-of-work chain is a solution to the Byzantine Generals' Problem. I'll try to rephrase it in that context. A number of Byzantine Generals each have a computer and want to attack the King's wi-fi by brute…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
I'll try and hurry up and release the sourcecode as soon as possible to serve as a reference to help clear up all these implementation questions. Ray Dillinger (Bear) wrote: Only the buyer signs, and there's no blinding. Identities are…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
Ray Dillinger wrote: Right, it's ECC digital signatures. A new key pair is used for every transaction. It's not pseudonymous in the sense of nyms identifying people, but it is at least a little pseudonymous in that the next action on a…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin v0.1 released
Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending. It's completely decentralized with no server or central authority. See bitcoin.org for screenshots.…
- Private email (Wei Dai)
Re: Citation of your b-money page
I wanted to let you know, I just released the full implementation of the paper I sent you a few months ago, Bitcoin v0.1. Details, download and screenshots are at www.bitcoin.org I think it achieves nearly all the goals you set out to…
- Private email (Adam Back)
Re: Citation of your Hashcash paper
Thanks for the pointers you gave me to Wei Dai's b-money paper and others. I just released the open source implementation of my paper, Bitcoin v0.1. Details, download and screenshots are at www.bitcoin.org The main idea of the system is…
- bitcoin-list (SourceForge)
[bitcoin-list] Bitcoin v0.1 Alpha release notes
Release notes for Bitcoin v0.1 Alpha Bitcoin is a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending. It's completely decentralized with no server or central authority. You can find screenshots and the…
- Private email (Dustin Trammell)
Re: Bitcoin v0.1 released
Sweet, I was looking for a group like that on Usenet at one point to see what I would use if I needed, and nothing really fit. I'm sure Google groups is a lot easier to post to. There are some scenarios where a Usenet or Google group…
- Private email (Dustin Trammell)
Re: Bitcoin v0.1 released
There's at least one node who's inbound IP keeps changing all the time within the same class B. Maybe every time the program is run. I wasn't expecting that. Do you mind if I CC the rest of this to bitcoin-list or Cryptography? BTW,…
- Cryptography mailing list (metzdowd)
Bitcoin v0.1 released
I would be surprised if 10 years from now we're not using electronic currency in some way, now that we know a way to do it that won't inevitably get dumbed down when the trusted third party gets cold feet. It could get started in a narrow…
- Private email (Dustin Trammell)
Re: Bitcoin v0.1 released
I would be surprised if 10 years from now we're not using electronic currency in some way, now that we know a way to do it that won't inevitably get dumbed down when the trusted third party gets cold feet. It could get started in a narrow…
- Private email (Dustin Trammell)
Re: Bitcoin v0.1 released
I would be surprised if 10 years from now we're not using electronic currency in some way, now that we know a way to do it that won't inevitably get dumbed down when the trusted third party gets cold feet. It could get started in a narrow…
- bitcoin-list (SourceForge)
Re: [bitcoin-list] Bitcoin v0.1 released
I would be surprised if 10 years from now we're not using electronic currency in some way, now that we know a way to do it that won't inevitably get dumbed down when the trusted third party gets cold feet. It could get started in a narrow…
- bitcoin-list (SourceForge)
[bitcoin-list] Bitcoin v0.1.5 released
Version 0.1.5 is now available. It includes the fix for the problem Nicholas had, checking for disk full and changes to try to improve things that were confusing. Special thanks to Nicholas and Dustin for all their help and feedback!…
- P2P Foundation p2p-research list
[p2p-research] Bitcoin P2P e-currency v0.1 released
Announcing the release of Bitcoin, a new open source peer-to-peer electronic cash system that's completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties. Users hold the crypto keys to their own money and transact directly with…
- P2P Foundation forum
Bitcoin open source implementation of P2P currency
It is a global distributed database, with additions to the database by consent of the majority, based on a set of rules they follow: - Whenever someone finds proof-of-work to generate a block, they get some new coins - The proof-of-work…
- Private email (Mike Hearn)
Questions about BitCoin
Hi Mike, I'm glad to answer any questions you have. If I get time, I ought to write a FAQ to supplement the paper. There is only one global chain. The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day…
- Private email (Mike Hearn)
Questions about BitCoin
Mike Hearn wrote: My best guess - it is the length of the global chain, and the rapid advance at the start is as the software downloads and verifies the preceding blocks in the chain as being valid. Right. I'm trying to think of more…
- Private email (Martti Malmi)
Re: Bitcoin
mmalmi@cc.hut.fi wrote: That would be great! I added you (dmp1ce) as a dev to the sourceforge project and gave you access to edit the web space and everything. Definitely. This will be an absolutely essential feature once things get…
- Private email (Martti Malmi)
Re: Bitcoin
That's a good point that since you know how many coins exist and how fast new ones are created, you could set a support price based on the amount of legacy currency you have and be sure you'll have enough to meet all demands. I had…
- Private email (Martti Malmi)
Re: Setup, Autorun, v0.1.6
Yeah, I put back your startup folder shortcut code and it started fine for me too on XP and Vista. For good measure, I changed it to make the shortcut settings look identical to one I manually created. I set the working directory to where…
- Private email (Martti Malmi)
linux-0.1.6-test7
test 7: Backup your data directory before running this, just in case. Workaround for the Db::open/Db::close "Bad file descriptor" exception. Might also make the initial block download faster. The workaround is to open the database handles…
- BitcoinTalk
Repost: Bitcoin Maturation
-------------------- bitcoinbitcoin: Bitcoin Maturation Posted:Thu 01 of Oct, 2009 (14:12 UTC) From the user's perspective the bitcoin maturation process can be broken down into 8 stages. 1. The initial network transaction that occurs…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Repost: Bitcoin Maturation
It's important to have network connectivity while you're trying to generate a coin (block) and at the moment it is successfully generated. 1) During generation (when the status bar says "Generating" and you're using CPU to find a…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Questions about Bitcoin
1-3: For that level of anonymity you need to connect through TOR, which will be possible with version 0.2, which is only a few weeks away. I'll post TOR instructions at that time. 4: Version 0.1.5: backup the whole %appdata%\Bitcoin…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: A few suggestions
The average total coins generated across the network per day stays the same. Faster machines just get a larger share than slower machines. If everyone bought faster machines, they wouldn't get more coins than before. We should have a…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Win32 CPU Cycles vs 'Live Protection' Engines ?
Thanks for that. Which version of Windows?
- Private email (Martti Malmi)
Re: Exchange options
Maybe the current difficulty of buying LR is already the limit of how easy it can get in that direction. Every conventional payment method has refutability as their way to cope with their lack of passwords and crypto. The system is wide…
- BitcoinTalk
Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
We had our first automatic adjustment of the proof-of-work difficulty on 30 Dec 2009. The minimum difficulty is 32 zero bits, so even if only one person was running a node, the difficulty doesn't get any easier than that. For most of last…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: What's with this odd generation?
There's a small transaction fee for very large transactions. The node that generates the block that contains the transaction gets the fee. If the same money gets sent again, it won't incur the fee again. If all you have is generated coins…
- Private email (Martti Malmi)
Re: JSON-RPC status
I uploaded my JSON-RPC and command line implementation to SVN. I'm waiting to post on the forum when I've had more time to think about the commands. At least some method names are going to change. To enable the RPC server, add the switch…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
14/02/2010 0000000065465700000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 2009 1.00 30/12/2009 1.18 +18% 11/01/2010 1.31 +11% 25/01/2010 1.34 +2% 04/02/2010 1.82 +36% 14/02/2010 2.53 +39% Another big jump in difficulty yesterday from…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
I thought about that but there wasn't a practical way to do smaller increments. The frequency of block generation is balanced between confirming transactions as fast as possible and the latency of the network. The algorithm aims for an…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
2 seconds of latency in both directions should reduce your generation success by less than 1%. Probably OK, but I'm not sure. The protocol is designed to resync to the next message, and messages get re-requested from all the other nodes…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Number of connections
Nodes stop trying to initiate connections once they have 15. If you can accept incoming connections, then you can get well above that from nodes connecting to you, otherwise you max out at 15. I don't know if there's any reason to have 15…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Current Bitcoin economic model is unsustainable
Excellent analysis, xc. A rational market price for something that is expected to increase in value will already reflect the present value of the expected future increases. In your head, you do a probability estimate balancing the odds…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: generation slowed down dramatically
Just a random streak of bad luck. It looks steady to me. Competition doesn't have an effect until the next automatic retarget adjustment, and we haven't reached the next one yet. The adjustments are every 2016 blocks. To calculate our…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Bitcoin Address Collisions
There's a separate public/private keypair for every bitcoin address. You don't have a single private key that unlocks everything. Bitcoin addresses are a 160-bit hash of the public key, everything else in the system is 256-bit. If there…
- BitcoinTalk
Command Line and JSON-RPC
Version 0.2.6 on SVN can now run as a daemon and be controlled by command line or JSON-RPC. On Linux it needs libgtk2.0-0 installed, but does not need a GUI running. Hopefully gtk can be installed without having a windowing system…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
The automatic adjustment happened earlier today. 24/02/2010 0000000043b3e500000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 24/02/2010 3.78 +49% I updated the first post.
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
The formula is based on the time it takes to generate 2016 blocks. The difficulty is multiplied by 14/(actual days taken). For instance, this time it took 9.4 days, so the calculation was 14/9.4 = 1.49. Previous difficulty 2.53 * 1.49 =…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: bitcoin auto-renice-ing
It sets different priorities for each thread. The generate threads run at PRIO_MIN. The other threads rarely take any CPU and run at normal. #define THREAD_PRIORITY_LOWEST PRIO_MIN #define THREAD_PRIORITY_BELOW_NORMAL 2 #define…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Could the bitcoin network be destroyed by someone generating endless bitcoin add
When you generate a new bitcoin address, it only takes disk space on your own computer (like 500 bytes). It's like generating a new PGP private key, but less CPU intensive because it's ECC. The address space is effectively unlimited. It…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Odd amount of generated coins
In the SVN version, if a transaction requires a transaction fee, it says "This transaction is over the size limit. You can still send it for a fee of #, which goes to the nodes that process your transaction and helps to support the…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
That's a good idea. I'm not sure where exactly to fit that in, but it could certainly calculate the expected average time between blocks generated, and then people would know what to expect. Every node and each processor has a different…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
I integrated the hashmeter idea into the SVN version. It displays khash/s in the left section of the status bar. Two new log messages: 21/06/2010 01:23 hashmeter 2 CPUs 799 khash/s 21/06/2010 01:23 generated 50.00 grep your debug.log for…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: How fast do the fastest computers generate bitcoins?
I've noticed that hashing performance doesn't vary as much between CPUs as you'd expect. Compared to an old CPU, a newer CPU doesn't show as much of a speedup at hashing as it does on general benchmarks. I guess recent CPU optimizations…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
Agree. Certainly too trivial to clutter the user's attention with. I changed it to every 30 minutes. If I increased it to every 10 minutes, it would still be a small enough presence in the log file. Question is whether that would be more…
- Private email (Martti Malmi)
0.3.0 released
I uploaded 0.3.0 beta to sourceforge and updated the links on bitcoin.org. I still need to post the announcement message on the forum and mailing list. Here's what I've prepared: Announcing version 0.3 of Bitcoin, the P2P cryptocurrency!…
- BitcoinTalk
Bitcoin 0.3 released!
Announcing version 0.3 of Bitcoin, the P2P cryptocurrency! Bitcoin is a digital currency using cryptography and a distributed network to replace the need for a trusted central server. Escape the arbitrary inflation risk of centrally…
- Private email (Martti Malmi)
\[bitcoin-list\] Bitcoin 0.3 released!
Announcing version 0.3 of Bitcoin, the P2P cryptocurrency! Bitcoin is a digital currency using cryptography and a distributed network to replace the need for a trusted central server. Escape the arbitrary inflation risk of centrally…
- bitcoin-list (SourceForge)
[bitcoin-list] Bitcoin 0.3 released!
Announcing version 0.3 of Bitcoin, the P2P cryptocurrency! Bitcoin is a digital currency using cryptography and a distributed network to replace the need for a trusted central server. Escape the arbitrary inflation risk of centrally…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Security
I'll start thinking about how to do this. At the moment, you can kind of use -connect. You can use -connect to make it connect to local computers on your LAN, like -connect=192.168.0.100. If you start it out blank and don't let it connect…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: No blocks downloaded... why?
So that was responsible for keeping blocks from downloading? The link: "Win32 CPU Cycles vs 'Live Protection' Engines" For BitcoinFX, Live Protection was keeping it from getting CPU for generating coins. You said your friend was getting…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: resource hog
In Windows, you select the process in the task manager, right click, Set Priority. Set it to BelowNormal or Low. That shouldn't make a difference though. If you turn off Generate Coins, does the CPU usage go flat? That would confirm that…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: stopped prodicing coins
Thanks for making that calculator. The difficulty doubled a day or two ago, plus it's just random and you can have surprisingly long dry spells.
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Runaway CPU usage for 64bit BitCoin (Linux Client)
After it initially tries incorrectly to set itself to the lowest priority, the generate thread only changes its priority again temporarily when it finds a block. When you've found a block, you should want it to hurry up and broadcast it…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Runaway CPU usage for 64bit BitCoin (Linux Client)
OK, the undocumented switch "-minimizetotray" which re-enables the option. I uploaded the change to SVN.
- BitcoinTalk
Re: resource hog
Then all the CPU time is the generate thread, which definitely runs at the lowest possible priority, idle priority. It's normal that your CPU meter is 100%. Since it's idle priority, it won't actually slow anything else down, even though…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: 0.3.1 release candidate, please test
I don't think you have a particular problem, I think your system is laggy because you're running a lot of things at once and hitting the pagefile because memory is full. You confirmed when you shut off generation that your CPU drops to…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: 0.3.1 release candidate, please test
I was not able to reproduce this. I have dual-proc, so I ran two memory hogs. Bitcoin got 0% of CPU according to the task manager. The khash/sec meter stayed stuck because it couldn't get any CPU to update it. Do you have dual-proc? Are…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Runaway CPU usage for 64bit BitCoin (Linux Client)
The fix for the thread priority level on linux is available in the 0.3.1 release candidate here: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=383.msg3198#msg3198
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
The proof-of-work difficulty is currently 45.38. (see http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php) It's about to increase again in a few hours. It's only been 3-4 days since the last increase, so I expect it will increase by the max…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Request: expected bitcoins per day display
Many businesses are like that. For a car salesman, when will the next customer walk in the door? On the OP's question, it's a good feature, but the question is, how would we word it so people don't expect to get something after that…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
It adjusted to 181.54 a few minutes ago. Typical time to get a block is about a week now. The difficulty can adjust down as well as up. The network should be generating close to 6 blocks per hour now.
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
Yes, about 20 hours. (120 conf / 6 blocks per hour = 20 hours) That's the normal length of time before you can spend it. You know long before that that you won one.
- BitcoinTalk
Re: The dollar cost of bitmining energy
Neat chart. Difficulty just increased by 4 times, so now your cost is US$0.02/BTC.
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
Right, the difficulty adjustment is trying to keep it so the network as a whole generates an average of 6 blocks per hour. The time for your block to mature will always be around 20 hours. The recent adjustment put us back to close to 6…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Nenolod, the guy that wants to prove Bitcoin doesn't work.
0.3.2 has some security safeguards to lock in the block chain up to this point and limit the damage a little if someone gets 50%. But if someone has 50%+ of the CPU power and malicious intent, they can prove what it already says in the…
- BitcoinTalk
Bitcoin 0.3.2 released
Download links available now on bitcoin.org. Everyone should upgrade to this version. - Added a simple security safeguard that locks-in the block chain up to this point. - Reduced addr messages to save bandwidth now that there are plenty…
- BitcoinTalk
JSON-RPC password
I uploaded to SVN my changes to add a password to JSON-RPC. If you're set up to build, please test it. The -server switch is replaced with -rpcpw=<password>, which is also used with bitcoind. bitcoin -rpcpw=<password> -- runs with…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Did block generation crawl to a halt?
Nice graph! A moving average to smooth it out would be nice. http://nullvoid.org/bitcoin/statistix.php says 212 blocks in the last 24 hours, or 8.8 per hour.
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Stealing Coins
2^80 is if you can use a birthday attack. You can't use a birthday attack for this, so the difficulty is the full 2^160 bits. Although, if you were trying to crack any one of 1 million (2^20) transactions, you could do a partial birthday…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing
New difficulty factor 244.213223092 +35% I updated the first post. date, difficulty factor, % change 2009 1.00 30/12/2009 1.18 +18% 11/01/2010 1.31 +11% 25/01/2010 1.34 +2% 04/02/2010 1.82 +36% 14/02/2010 2.53 +39% 24/02/2010 3.78 +49%…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Difficulty
You were looking at the wrong code. Here's the code that applies: Code: bool CBlock::CheckBlock() const { ... // Check timestamp if (nTime > GetAdjustedTime() + 2 * 60 * 60) return error("CheckBlock() : block timestamp too far in the…
- BitcoinTalk
Webpage idea: Next predicted difficulty change
It would be neat if someone had a page (like that handy calculator at http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php) that projects what the next difficulty adjustment will be. projected difficulty adjustment multiplier =…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: latency and locality
Once you get away from a system where each node's influence is proportional to their CPU power, then what else do you use to determine who is (approximately) one person?
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Bitcoin minting is thermodynamically perverse
It's the same situation as gold and gold mining. The marginal cost of gold mining tends to stay near the price of gold. Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange.…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: bitcoin generation broken in 0.3.8? (64-bit)
I uploaded 0.3.8.1 for Linux with re-built 64-bit. I ran a difficulty 1 test with it and it has generated blocks. http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=765.0 Download:…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Not a suggestion
Still thinking this idea through... The only job the network needs to do is to tell whether a spend of an outpoint is the first or not. If we're willing to have clients keep the history for their own money, then some of the information…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Where is the separate discussion devoted to possible Bitcoin weaknesses.
It doesn't have to be such a breaking change. New nodes could accept old transactions for a long time until most nodes have already upgraded before starting to refuse transactions without PoW. Or, they could always accept old…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Bitcoin Watchdog Service
True, there would probably be someone with a dial-up modem or satellite dish internet. Rarer would be someone who has both that and the wired internet that has the outage, but if it's a big enough segment to matter, out of a million…
- BitcoinTalk
tcatm's 4-way SSE2 for Linux 32/64-bit is in 0.3.10
0.3.10 has tcatm's 4-way SSE2 as an option switch. Use the switch "-4way" to turn it on. Without the switch you get Crypto++ ASM SHA-256. I could only get this working with Linux. Download: Get 0.3.10 from…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: overflow bug SERIOUS
Starting at 67000 is perfect. Yeah, at the moment you'll stop at 74638. It should start slowly creeping up as more nodes upgrade and generate. Linux build links below. The Linux version includes tcatm's 4-way SSE2 SHA-256 that makes…
- BitcoinTalk
Version 0.3.10 - block 74638 overflow PATCH!
Version 0.3.10 patches the block 74638 overflow bug. http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823 The Linux version includes tcatm's 4-way SSE2 SHA-256 that makes generating faster on i5, i7 (with hyperthreading) and AMD CPU's. Try the…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: 0.3.10.1 Question on where block should be
I suspect there's some difficulty receiving blocks if all the nodes you're connected to are 0.3.9 or lower. We need enough of us so that at least one node you connect to will be 0.3.10. The problem will start to go away when we make up…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: overflow bug SERIOUS
On Windows, findstr /c:"version message" debug.log It looks like the bad chain was on block 74678 recently. Can't wait to overtake it. On the stats at http://nullvoid.org/bitcoin/statistix.php there's been 5 blocks per hour in the last 3…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: tcatm's 4-way SSE2 for Linux 32/64-bit 0.3.9 rc2
GCC 4.3.3 doesn't support -march=amdfamk10. I get: sha256.cpp:1: error: bad value (amdfamk10) for -march= switch Hey, you may be onto something! hyperthreading didn't help before because all the work was in the arithmetic and logic units,…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: tcatm's 4-way SSE2 for Linux 32/64-bit is in 0.3.10
cpu family 6 model 26 stepping 4 is an Intel Core i7. That's a 23% speedup with -4way, 63% total speedup with -4way + hyperthreading. 33% faster with hyperthreading than without it.
- BitcoinTalk
Re: checkpointing the block chain
There is no way for the software to automatically know if one chain is better than another except by the greatest proof-of-work. In the design it was necessary for it to switch to a longer chain no matter how far back it has to go. The…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: checkpointing the block chain
Total proof-of-work.
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Difficulty: More nodes active, or faster nodes?
The performance numbers posted from a VIA C7's hardware SHA-256 weren't astronomical. Only in the 1500 khash/s range. If you think about it, just because it's implemented in hardware doesn't mean it's crazy fast. It still has to do all…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Checking the block chain on load
In the next SVN rev, I'll make it only go back to the last checkpoint at block 74000. If we need to correct a problem in the future, we can always make sure it goes back at least as far back as the problem. Also, I'm adding code to verify…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: 28 days without generation, i have 4200khash/s
Search debug.log for "proof-of-work found". If you find any, then check for any errors right after that. The margin is 2 hours. This should be solved in SVN rev 141 and the next release (0.3.11+). It'll pop up a message box alerting you…
- BitcoinTalk
Auto-detect for 128-bit 4-way SSE2
SVN rev 150 has some code to try to auto-detect whether to use 4-way SSE2. We need this because it's only faster on certain newer CPUs that have 128-bit SSE2 and not ones with 64-bit SSE2. It uses the CPUID instruction to get the CPU…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Always pay transaction fee?
I implemented this change in SVN rev 157. The reason I previously made it so high was to allow very large transactions without hitting the transaction fee. The threshold was around 26,000 BTC for transactions made of 50 BTC generated…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: How to overthrow the GPU Oligarchs
This is the point of confusion. extraNonce is not part of the block header, it is part of the first transaction. It does not slow down your hashing. It does not change the size of the header. We need to be vigilant and nip in the bud any…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: ERROR - PLEASE HELP ME!
He was generating invalid blocks at difficulty 1.0. He must have a corrupted entry in his blk0001.dat or blkindex.dat file. He just needs to delete blk*.dat and let it redownload. The safety lockdown detected the problem and was…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: OpenCL miner for the masses
Thanks m0mchil for keeping up on the updates! GPU miners, please upgrade as soon as possible to shut down the free transaction abuse! This version has the new priority-based limit on free transaction spam. Before SVN 184, compiling…
- BitcoinTalk
New getwork
I uploaded a redesign of m0mchil's getwork to SVN rev 189 (version 31601) m0mchil's external bitcoin miner idea has solved a lot of problems. GPU programming is immature and hard to compile, and I didn't want to add additional…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: New getwork
getwork does the byte-reversing. midstate, data and hash1 are already big-endian, and you pass data back still big-endian, so you work in big-endian and don't have to do any byte-reversing. They're the same data that is passed to the…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: OpenCL miner for the masses
A revised version of getwork is now in the official client, but the miners need to be updated a little to use it.
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Re: RFC: ship block chain 1-74000 with release tarballs?
I tested it on a slow 7 year old drive, where bandwidth and CPU were clearly not the bottleneck. Initial download took 1 hour 20 minutes. If it's taking a lot longer than that, certainly 24 hours, then it must be downloading from a very…
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Re: New demonstration CPU miner available
You should try it with tcatm's 4-way SSE2 SHA in sha256.cpp. It compiles fine as a C file, just rename sha256.cpp to sha256.c. I was able to get it to work in simple tests on Windows, but not when linked in with Bitcoin. It may have a…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Cooperative mining
ribuck's description is spot on. Pool operators can modify their getwork to take one additional parameter, the address to send your share to. The easy way for the pool operator would be to wait until the next block is found and divy it up…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: Is safe running bitcoins with the same wallet on more computers simultaneously?
Very much not. Using multiple copies of wallet.dat is not recommended or supported, in fact all of Bitcoin is designed to defeat that. Both copies will get screwed up. If you're trying to consolidate your generated coins into one wallet,…
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Re: Version 0.3.18
New transaction templates can be added as needed. Within a few days, there will be plenty of GPU power that accepts and works on it. Network support will be thorough long before there'll be enough clients who understand how to receive and…
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Re: BitDNS and Generalizing Bitcoin
I think it would be possible for BitDNS to be a completely separate network and separate block chain, yet share CPU power with Bitcoin. The only overlap is to make it so miners can search for proof-of-work for both networks…
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Re: Fees in BitDNS confusion
Not locktime. There's a possible design for far in the future: You intentionally write a double-spend. You write it with the same inputs and outputs, but this time with a fee. When your double-spend gets into a block, the first spend…
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Re: BitDNS and Generalizing Bitcoin
Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale. Bitcoin and BitDNS can be used separately. Users shouldn't have to download all of both to use one or the other. BitDNS users may not want to download…
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Re: BitDNS and Generalizing Bitcoin
Right, the exchange rate between domains and bitcoins would float. A longer interval than 10 minutes would be appropriate for BitDNS. So far in this discussion there's already a lot of housekeeping data required. It will be much easier if…
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Re: BitDNS and Generalizing Bitcoin
I agree. All transactions, IP changes, renewals, etc. should have some fee that goes to the miners. You might consider a certain amount of work to generate a domain, instead of a fixed total circulation. The work per domain could be on a…
- BitcoinTalk
Re: BitDNS and Generalizing Bitcoin
@dtvan: all 3 excellent points. 1) IP records don't need to be in the chain, just do registrar function not DNS. And CA problem solved, neat. 2) Pick one TLD, .web +1. 3) Expiration and significant renewal costs, very important. Avoiding…
- Private email (Martti Malmi)
Re: Bitcoin.org backups
Gavin Andresen wrote: I agree, don't let the database out of your hands. There's private PM in there, e-mail addresses, passwords. BTW, password hashes = passwords. It's easy to break the hash of short passwords people use on forums. 6…
- Private email (Mike Hearn)
More BitCoin questions
Open source. Perfect. Once your code shows how to simplify it down, other authors can follow your lead. Client is a less daunting challenge than full implementation. If it's within reach of more developers, they'll come up with more…
- Private email (Mike Hearn)
Open sourced my Java SPV impl
I hope you are doing well. I finally got all the lawyers happy enough to release BitCoinJ under the Google name using the Apache 2 license: It's incomplete - notably it doesn't properly handle block chain splits yet - but the rest is…
- Private email (Mike Hearn)
Open sourced my Java SPV impl
See these threads: http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/ind ex.php?topic=1786.msg22119#msg 22119 http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/ind ex.php?topic=2181.msg28729#msg 28729 I see. So right now fees are tricky because you have to decide up front what the…
