Bitcoin Forum

Ok, thread title is a bit misleading, I haven't actually done the genesis block calculation part done. I'd like to also take a minute or two and explain to you that I aren't exactly a good coder, I started doing C in my early days of mining in 2011 and playing with cgminer and nonces and stuff. I refused to read a book on C, so everything I've learned about C is through trial&error, well OK I have not learned much so trial&error is how I get my results. The equivalent of this would be trying to drive a car as if you have 10 years behind the wheel without actually knowing how to.

So basically do not expect the best code, I could have done things in there that aren't efficient, or just plain simply wrong and that would be because I don't know how to do them in a different way.

The code is here http://pastebin.com/nhuuV7y9, pure C. No binaries for obvious reasons. The code relies on OpenSSL. Since you will need OpenSSL either way, as it is a Bitcoin dependency, I believe it won't be an issue.
*Implemented Genesis Block finder

Cons

• Program assumes one input and one output. So trying to create a merkle hash like the one in Freicoin with multiple inputs and outputs is not possible with this program.
• Program at the moment assumes 50 coins, but this can be changed in the code very easily.
• This is probably the most important one. I can re-create the Bitcoin merkle hash with ease, but when I tried to test it with Litecoin's timestamp message, it failed. Something to do with Unicode. I will not lie, my understanding of Unicode and ASCII is even less than my understanding of C. Basically, try to avoid apostrophes,commas and other special characters. Someone more knowledgeable can patch this

Usage

Example
Which will output

The timestamp needs to be in quotes if it's longer than a word, because it will get treated as separate arguments than a whole string.

So yeah, more cons than pros, but if you like what I've done, please drop some reward to the address on my signature :)

Wow, it's been made.

Interesting, the Litecoin genesis block seems to have a Unicode "smart quote" (fancier apostrophe) encoded in UTF-8.  With my console configured for UTF-8 encoding, this seems to work to reproduce the LTC genesis tx:


(Notice "Apple’s" as opposed to "Apple's")  This seems to correspond with the genesis tx at this block explorer (http://explorer.litecoin.net/tx/97ddfbbae6be97fd6cdf3e7ca13232a3afff2353e29badfab7f73011edd4ced9).  Cool, thanks OP!

(Also, this timestsamp may work in bash without terminal settings: "`echo -en NY Times 05/Oct/2011 Steve Jobs, Apple\\\\xE2\\\\x80\\\\x99s Visionary, Dies at 56`")

I am glad it works for you. But a lot of users, me included are on Windows.

http://www.evanjones.ca/unicode-in-c.html

But you can also just pass it as binary by converting it to hex reading from a UTF-8 file containing the string...

I was able to implement the block hashing part, will clean it up and release later.

I have updated the code with block hashing to find a genesis block. If you need to specify custom nonce and unixtime(to re-create a block from some chain), you will have to edit the source.

http://pastebin.com/nhuuV7y9

I tried your program with bitcoin's parameters:


Why I don't get the same genesis hash as in the bitcoin program?


Do I look at the wrong place?

It looks like you've got a linebreak/space in the first argument.  I noticed this in OP's post too, if I double click the first argument it stops highlighting halfway through.  If I drag-select the whole thing and paste it somewhere, there's a space.  So, make sure you don't have any space between "bc3f" and "4cef".

I retried, still the same, no space or line-break in between... it's weird why it is not match.

It's because the nonce and unixtime are different.

For bitcoin, it's unixtime = 1231006505 and nonce = 2083236893

I will have to rework the program a bit and start working with switches for better control and/or parsing the data from a file.

OK got it. Nice, with these as initial value the genesis block come out immediately:


Nice program!

Little help please:


Thanks!!!

How can I determine the first block as a checkpoint if I can't mine? Or can I mine without checkpoints?

nice job. Ill need to add a hard drive to my pc to store all the new block chains that will be coming out  ;D

For future reference, you need to include the libraries in the command:

Bumping this thread for anyone that might want to make MORE sha256 alt coins.

Subbed

hi,

I downloaded(link in 1st post) & compiled under windows(mingw) & try to get the genesis block. Unable to get:


Please advise. Thanks.

You need to preset the UNIX time variable and nonce to match the ones there, otherwise it will find a different one.

From:


to:


?

Thanks.

Ok. Got it! Thanks.

If you want to get the exact same genesis block as Bitcoin, you might as well just set the nonce as well, no point in waiting minutes.

I've tried, and I got a 9 digit nonce, and bitcoind is unable to validate and ERRORs on boot and looks like an invalid genesis block in the .dat

any thoughts?

Perfect!
But I can't open your link of code.
Please put your code on github.
Thanks!

Remember -

In this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=187888.0) you mentioned to Alex figuring out how to do this for Scrypt based hashes.  Did you ever post that code?

Like Alex, I'm just fooling around, but would like to make a "CPU Only" coin, perhaps modifying the litecoin fork to require even more memory per thread (512mb per thread???).

Anyhow, would love to grab your Scrypted based code if you have it available.  Did get your SHA256 one running.

Thanks,

Cassey

If you are looking to make "CPU only" coins, seriously, this thread is not the right place. Btw, when you are able to change the hashing, generating genesis block will not be a problem. :D

I'm still a bit confused. If I were creating a new coin and needed a new pubkey where would that come from? Is this a random ECDSA public key?

I am sorry, but if you dont know the answer to this question, you should not be even thinking of creating a new coin.

You know... .I go to fix my car.... I ask the mechanic... hey how does a catalytic converter work? I don't understand what is does or what it is. He doesn't come back with a reply like yours....... Are you seriously being a dick or impersonating a dick?

But you don't have the ability to try and make your own car (and endanger others), that is where your analogy breaks down. Copy pasting a coin is too easy, except for some fiddly details. So again, if you dont know what you are doing, leave it. If you cant work it out yourself, then more indication you are out of your depth.

And just in case my analogy is not fitting - you might ask your surgeon how he'll do the operation on you, but you would not try the operation yourself (and again risk harming others).

Perhaps a bit blunt, but the point is valid.  Creating a coin is NOT for the faint of heart - I know I just launched one last week.  Probably put in 32+ hours and more likely 60+ (it was a blurry several weeks) making slow incremental progress followed by long periods of frustrations.   Yes, getting your genesis key build is a highlight, but there are dozens of other things to consider, like which difficulty algorithm your going to use to try and thwart the raiders, or at least make healing after them go smoother.  Are you going to have a support website?  How about a support forum? Where are you going to announce?  Can you get all the various QT wallets built?  Do you know any pool operators?  Will you be setting up a twitter account?  Are you comfortable with using github?  How many coins, it any will you pre-mine?  If you don't pre-mine are you willing to lose control of your coin?  How often will you add checkpoint records?  Which coin are you cloning from and why?  Do you understand the math behind it all and why you don't want a 10 second block time?  etc.

People can not hand hold you through all of that.  Plan on spending a LOT of time on Google and not just looking at page one results.

If your not comfortable with that, take the original response to heart.

Doing the name change is the easy part.  (Mind you, I still find old references occasionally after a good dozen grep scans, like when a friend tried building the Mac QT wallet for me.)

Awesome work! Having a lot of fun playing with this.

Hi, compiled your first post and got the following:

./genesis 040184710fa689ad5023690c80f3a49c8f13f8d45b8c857fbcbc8bc4a8e4d3eb4b10f4d4604fa08 dce601aaf0f470216fe1b51850b4acf21b179c45070ac7b03a9 "NY Times 05/Oct/2011 Steve Jobs, Apple’s Visionary, Dies at 56" 486604799

Invalid public key length! 040184710fa689ad5023690c80f3a49c8f13f8d45b8c857fbcbc8bc4a8e4d3eb4b10f4d4604fa08

Please advise.

For anyone else who missed this on the first page, the compile line is:
gcc genesis_generator.c -o genesis_generator -lcrypto


The way I understand it, Bitcoin creats an address by generating a random number which corresponds to a single ECDSA public key / private key pair.  The public key is determined into a bitcoin address through some hashing and then encoding.  So there are many ECDSA pairs are saved in each wallet, one for each address.

2014 methods no longer work.
2017 Bitcoin / Litecoin codebase update
http://practicecoin.com/index.php/2017/04/19/genesis-block/

Can anyone modify this to allow for yescrypt algorithm?  Here is the yescrypt miner:

https://github.com/JayDDee/cpuminer-opt/tree/master/algo/yescrypt

Substantial bitcoin donations will come your way if you can!

So this is my first post ahah, but where does the pubkeyscript go on the new version of bitcoin? Need this for studying purposes

Thanks, it works great for me. I have made small changes to improve it, see https://github.com/liveblockchain/genesisgen (https://github.com/liveblockchain/genesisgen)

1. Gets invalid result when the timestamp string is longer than 76 bytes, as it has to use `OP_PUSHDATA1(0x4c)` as prefix of the data.


2. Add command line arguments for nonce and unixtime for quick poc test.

I made a port of this code into Golang for those who are interested. There is an error in the source of the miner at the end of the OP in that it doesn't correctly adjust the difficulty target search (it searches for only 4 zeroes at the big end instead of what nBits specifies, though this is the same as the minimum difficulty). I have fixed this, and it is precise to the bit. Possibly I could have made my job easier by converting the difficulty to big.Int and also the hash but the way I have written it correctly checks - I suspect that it would be equal or greater overhead to have to use the bytes to big.Int converter anyway.

https://github.com/calibrae-project/spawn/blob/e00ddd6ca93e1f96f69b75fd3b8536d98b45deb8/tools/genesis/create/creategenesis.go (https://github.com/calibrae-project/spawn/blob/e00ddd6ca93e1f96f69b75fd3b8536d98b45deb8/tools/genesis/create/creategenesis.go)

It does take quite a long time to compute the hash. On my i5-7600 running on one core it takes between 30 and 60 minutes. Of course the solver I have written isn't going to win any awards but a CPU is not the right device to compute hashes on anyway as a sole task. I guess it might be a good opportunity for me to learn about how to write goroutines and split the task amongst all the cores of the cpu by dividing the nonce-space and on my machine that would drop the time to find the right nonce by a quarter.

After thinking about it and reading about goroutines I figured out that parallelising such a search was very simple and as my routine grabs the current time at the end of the nonce number space and I have set them to start one second apart, this should dramatically improve the time it takes for my genesis generator to finish. Especially if you are running this on a machine with 8 or more cores.

Here is the updated version with parallel execution of the search:

https://github.com/calibrae-project/spawn/blob/94977557fcf0ae653e5c1a0c831a42ff0240b905/tools/genesis/create/creategenesis.go (https://github.com/calibrae-project/spawn/blob/94977557fcf0ae653e5c1a0c831a42ff0240b905/tools/genesis/create/creategenesis.go)

UPDATE:

I still had some things wrong and decided to set it to default to generating a random public key if no input was given. This now correctly targets the difficulty, the solutions generally have 3 bytes zero at the big end.

https://github.com/calibrae-project/spawn/blob/f682a9d7aa43a764682dec77cd6a50a0c6049537/tools/genesis/create/creategenesis.go (https://github.com/calibrae-project/spawn/blob/f682a9d7aa43a764682dec77cd6a50a0c6049537/tools/genesis/create/creategenesis.go)

It pops out the solution so fast it's almost pointless that it fans out use all your CPU threads to perform the search.

Enjoy!

didn't work for peercoin  ::)

Ethereum Smart Contract pre-compiled
https://github.com/satansdeer/ethereum-token-tutorial

Hello,

I am using the below code to generate genesis block. I got the Coinbase, PubkeyScript, Merkle Hash, Byteswapped. However, it is stuck at Generating block... . The Hashes/s and Nonce keep changing. I thought it will just take a few mins to generate the first block. But, generally, how much time does it take to generate the first block? Am I missing something? Should I have changed something in code to generate the first block faster?

Waiting for your reply.

Regards,
Harish

Updated for Blake hashing.

Also demonstrates changing the hashing algorithm for genesis block creation and the block reward.

https://github.com/bitcoinforktech/genesis-block-generator

Glad to see things like this still happening.

I originally learned from LernCoin

Should this work for pivx clone?

Have tried to use it for a pivx clone that has been running for about 3 years now. Expected that the actual genesis hash of the running chain would be the output after I've input all the required fields, but instead it outputs a different genesis block hash, as well as a different merkle, to what is in the chain/code.

Does this also work for neoscrypt ?