Bitcoin Forum

Just one more thing some of you respected speculators might enjoy playing with in your spare time

https://btc-e.com/tbx_exchanger

Please explain why anybody should care about the fact that a cryptocurrency is "GPU-hostile" yet not custom-hardware-hostile (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1305/what-features-of-scrypt-make-tenebrix-gpu-resistant).

You get higher price for such coins I guess.   Since it is much more difficult to mine than GPU friendly coins.

What silly nonsense.  It is no harder to mine; it just requires a different kind of device.

It's actually quite FPGA resistant. You need a 700+ buck FPGA to reach performance of a 100 buck CPU in Tenebrix (Already tested by Art, talk to him if you want nitty-gritty details)

Of course, ASIC customized to the task ("lots of fast memory" as you put it) could crunch this baybe fairly well, but for the love of Zod, TBX has to become hellishly expensive and hellishly popular for it to make sense to even try developing such a solution (and implementing it would likely still make no sense, since economies of scale make CPUs very cheap, and it is likely that the number of CPU crunchers you can deploy for the cost of a single "mem-rich" application-specific design would still outperform said application-specific scrypt-cruncher).

So it is quite hostile to at least one common class of "custom" hardware, and another one is plan uneconomical to deploy.

Also bear in mind that CPUs are common household items, even powerful multicoire ones. GPUs suited for mining well are less common. FPGAs are pretty much scientific and special-purpose exotica, and a Tenebrix-optimized ASIC is a theoretic entity, so Tenebrix has a potentially huge miner base, being well suited for the one of the most common types of computational substrate available, and less tendency to have its minerbase concentrated.

And of course there is the fact that CPUs GPUs and FPGAs all retain uses other than "mining some cryptocurrency" while a hypothetical Tenebrix ASIC will be only good for breaking a certain implementation of Scrypt, thus being completely worthless outside Tenebrix network, making a dedicated "Tenebrix cruncher board" even more economically unsound :)

So to sum up, Tenebrix is GPU-hostile and quite FPGAs hostile, and sufficiently tricky that even powerful ASICs (should such ever be designed for Tenebrix) would likely still be inferior to CPUs (but this time due to costs involved in making those ASICs happen)

All in all, quite custom-hardware hostile, it turns out to be.

I had a go at mining these since yesterday and it's really quite difficult to get a block...

I'm using:

1x i5 (4threads)
1x q6600 (3 threads)
1x athlon x2 (1 thread)
and 1 8-core xeon server (8 threads).

so far I've only managed to get 1 block on the i5... close to 20 hours now.

Hm, there are quite a bunch of heavy-hitters mining and hoarding TBX right now, and quite a bunch of miners of other coins running it at idle priority on their rigs, so soloing TBX might be a mite tricky, though what you report seems a mite too pessimistic. What scantimes are you using?

Also, did you try the new Tenebrix pool @ simplecoin.us ?

What are the max coins that can be mined, can't seem to find it?

Ok, I got 3 blocks now... I'm just using default settings.

The new algorithm is a good idea, but if you're trading (or otherwise supporting) this block chain you need to be aware that the founder "pre-mined" *3 years* worth of coins.  I'll let that sink in.  If you got in on day 1 you weren't an early adopter,  you were equivalent to some schmoe getting into bitcoin some time NEXT YEAR.  That's why the mining reward is 25 brix/block, because the founder took the first 3 years worth of coins for himself.

Priority one for all these scamchains is to get onto exchanges and be available for liquidation.  Even before mining pools.  Every chain this guy makes is listed on some exchange faster than you can say "wallet rape."

As long as the founder of this (same guy as geistgeld) keeps coughing up enough shitcoin variants at a rate of once per week he can make a good living from those not able to beat him to the exit.  For this one, with an exchange of .002 brix/btc he awarded himself 14,000 BTC (or at current prices, $60,000).  Not bad for a few days of work.

That's why the smart money in all the alt chains has their shitcoins for sale as soon as they're mined.  The tech is good, but IMO the future of this particular block chain is dubious.  I'm enjoying the bonus free ~BTC a day from this chain, of course.  No reason not to profit while it's still possible.

He's making it pretty clear that the chain is supposed to use spare CPU capacity. At the moment he can't really dump 7 million coins onto the market, so that has to wait for a while.

"Spare" cpu capacity still takes power (unless you're the botnet that just destroyed fairbrix and may or may not do the same to tenebrix).  He doesn't have to dump all 7 million -- so far with a week's worth of mining the community has generated less than 50k.  If he sells even 25% of what the rest of the miners generate he can still cash out pretty well without even impacting the "7 million."

Hence the posts to the speculation forum instead of keeping this in the alternative currencies forum until the "experimental" currency is ready for adoption.  The intent is to have greedy but ignorant investors provide more established, valuable currency ASAP.

Even if he makes $10k a week generating new shitcoin variants that's till a pretty good income for minor code changes and board spam.

I don't mind, it's free money to me.  But the "buy and hold" approach holds huge risks here.

Given that the premined coinage's existence and intent is stated on the official site and in the forums, and is trivially monitorable, you hardly need to make anyone with english reading skills "aware" of it (and those without won't get your post anyway)

Now, if I was really at a race to the exit, I would have cashed out before a pool, don't you think ?  ::)


Nah, more like "some of the shmott  speculator folks might enjoy toying on this small market with their spare change for fun or out of experimental curiosity".

It's not like I'm saying that it's the next HUGE THING BUY ALL OF IT NOW BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE, amrite ?


Actually, that would be pretty silly of me given that I know at least two people who are watching my premines via automatic tools. It's not very hard given that blockexplorer is up :)

Maybe you can phase out some of the coins eventually, that would drive up the price and build credibility.

Then the more it's mentioned the better, right?  I don't remember seeng "I've given myself about six years worth of coins the rest of you schmucks will mine" (and that's what 3 years worth of 50 btc/block turns into at 25 btc/block) featured prominently on the tenebrix website.  Me, I think that fact needs a bit more stress and exposure than it's received.


The problem with pyramids is you never know when the end will come.  It's all a guessing game.  The longer and bigger the pyramid lasts, the bigger the stake.  If tenebrix does take off you stand to win a lot more than $60,000.  It's a risk of existing vs potential payout.  Besides, if you cash out now you'll only get 2 chains worth of reward.  If you can get a dozen or more chains going before cashing out you'll do far better.

Plus you can, at some point, distribute some malware with the final shitcoin variant du jour, making the ultimate payout even sweeter.


Good for them.  But if you DO decide there's enough bids on the exchanges to cash out by the time they get the warning it'll be too late to do anything about it.  Their transactions (and any other speculator transactions), will be behind yours.

Also, isn't your goal to provide a coinage laundry service?  Just wondering when it'll be time to "test" it with your premined GG and brix.

Just picking on you because IMO you got waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too greedy with the premine total on tenebrix.  Any of the alt chain pyramids with gigantic premine totals are like that.  Hell, bitcoin itself, with a 1.5M Satoshi premine is like that.
But your latest is truly an amazing display of chutzpah.   

Well, the year count depends on whether you count the coins I already pledged for the faucet, and methinks that the fact being mentioned in the faq alongside with other technical details is pretty fair of me.

Yeah, I am actually a master hacker, just pretending to be a graphic designer who does alt-coins for fun. And, after some consideration, would also like to confess that I am Satoshi :)

(And of course it was me who stole 40 cakes.  ::) )

But I sort of like your paranoid mentality.


Um, tenebrix is not verily fast in terms of accumulating confirmations, and the warning will be triggered when I move money to exchange. By the time they "get" there (accumulate enough confirmations) there will be a panic spree already in progress.

Yes, those that don't go for bounties to devs and services go for that, and I will announce an open beta when it is implemented (currently, some very interesting stuff is discussed, but I need to run it through people like ArtForz just to know for sure it can be done securely and I don't get to sound like a doofus, before I even openly start discussing it  )

I will invite ya ;)


I am getting quite bored with the stale and inherently subjective discussion of "how big a premine is okay, and how big is not-okay", but I have already pledged 2 mils to a faucet not under my control so some of the concerned folks might sigh a sigh of relief that I now control less "mine-years".

If you think that I got "too far" and my "grasp exceeded grasp" you could at least say how many millions would you be okay with. would 1.5 be okay ?



Actually, btc is interesting in that not only "satoshi coinage" but other large unmoving coin masses do not concern speculators in the slightest (and I think that it doesn't matter whether the mass that crashes your market to shit is 0.7 mil or 7 mil, much like there is no difference between being crushed to death by a honda or an 18-wheel supertruck)



Uh, phase out ?

I find the idea...intriguing... could you outline it in more details ?

P.S.: Currently, TBX's price isnt bad for a coin less than 5 days old and only pool and exchange to boast off. The days of huge buy-ins at coin launch are over due to i0 pwnage and SC's embarrassing undead condition.

Still, so far it's a market you can play with for beer change, and methinks that denizens of this subforum might enjoy that.

Some companies buy back their own stock and invalidate them, thereby raising the price.

Maybe part of the fund could be used to buy some hardware to ensure minimal operation? Of course you can't really protect against a botnet...

I'm no economist, but I'm sure the whole Cryptoeconomy environment would lend itself to some academic studies etc.
Funding to manipulate currencies, haha.

Well, frankly, I'd rather hire developers than buy "cold iron". In fact, I intend to use a large portion exactly for that.

Devs are more useful than a bunch of boxes. Also, more fun.

Also, I've already pledged 2 mil to fuel a "long faucet" (more likely, several) and I think you've read about the whole "transaction mixing buffer" thing :)


Well, this thing is, to some degree, and experiment, done for fun and out of curiosity (BTC too is an experiment in progress, just one that is getting more and more serious in its attitude)

One of the main reasons why I made GG and TBX is because I think things are getting way too stale with the srs bzns attitude taking hold in the community.

MAN to be honest I think you are not giving this man enough credit !!! He made a new world record in premined virtual coinage and all the coding is done by ArtForz ( wonder what he is getting in return ? maybe the .exe is a trojan and he gets to play with our machines etc. ? ) so truly a new record. To bad I am not a coder to create the newest ScamCoin daily served with a fat dose of BS  ::)

Waiting on SolidCoin 2 but don't think that will be much of a refresh with its tax but much better than 7 million premined.

Actually, it's  premining with no upper bound and  using your electricity :D

Also don't forget completely unaudited "reimbursement" thing.

So no, I am quite a humble little man compared to a shining Demigod that is Coin Hunter, a true incarnation of Loki among us, simple mortals.


It's not coding skills you lack, but imagination  8)


Now this, ladies an gentlemen, should actually improve your confidence, because ArtForz's work is quite awesome indeed.  ;D

I wish i had 7million bricks to dump at 0.001

There must be buyers for 7mil Brix to sell them!
The market isn't quite big enough yet for that!

You can!  Just fork the bitcoin code, tweak a few parameters, come up with a catchy name, announce it on the alt currencies and speculation board.  Heck, give the btce guys a chunk of your premine (go with 20 mil, why not the first 20 years of mining head start?) and you might be listed on an exchange day 1 and cashed out by the end of the week.

This alt chain nonsense won't stop until people hopping on the freshest pyramid like it was the newest block at a proportional pool get burned to a crisp in less than 24 hours.   The current "weeks" is too long, IMO.

As far as how much premine is enough -- well.  The OP clearly feels that 6 years worth is enough.   I might feel that 24 years worth might be better.  Others think simply being the earliest of the earliest adopters on an even playing field with others is enough.  All I know is this is every shitcoin is coming out with a more and more egregious pyramid attached, and while I'm glad for the bonus free bitcoins I feel a bit sorry for "investors."  Too bad, I believe this particular algorithm holds promise.  I'm a bit upset the OP has soiled it for everyone though.

Good idea, I think my new chain will have 1000Billion pre-mined,
and first million adopters will receive 1 million coins each. get ready to sign up yo!

Just a word of advice - add some specialsauce, like super-fast blocks and escrow transactions, or GPU-hostility.

Also, IIRC you can't have more than 130-something billions in a chain  :'(


Since I think local denizens are smart not to play with anything but beer change on alt currencies less than a week old, and since there is not much difference between market effects of me trying to cash out on TBX market and some of the "unmoving bitcoin masses" trying to cash out on bitcoin market (with the notable exception that my stash you can trivially watch with blockexplorer, and trivially beat it to the exit due to the fact that your TBX on exchange don't have to accumulate confirmations, while  the "dead but dreaming" masses of bitcoins are too diverse and disperse, making them harder to monitor), the only people I "soiled" it for are people with a certain kind of "sportslike ethics".

I really have a hard time understanding competition as it operates in sports (and the whole field of professional sports altogether), and even harder time grokking people who ascribe sports-competitive properties to processes pertaining to bizarre not-quite-really-money spawned through eldritch mathematications.
To those people, all I can say is "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you"


Actually, no, the sheer time it took ixcoin (and its i0 cousin) to sorta (notreally?) die suggests that alt-chains dying and breeding has little to do with their design originality or presence of authorial cashout.

Ixcoin live(d? s?) long past its creator cashed out and stopped giving a damn.

Best idea ever !!!

1. Make alternate chain with huge premine
2. Wait until you can cash out
3. ???
4. PROFIT

Well, absence of cash-out on my part in both TBX and GEG is backed by blockexplorer.

Your claims are backed by...um... ??? ... nothing.

I don't understand all the sentiment against GPU mining, FPGA mining, and mining in general.

Mining (by any pseudo-anonymous party) keeps the currency network secure, and free from central control.

The way Tenebrix is set up, wouldn't the only big players in the mining sector be those that could afford super-specialized hardware?  Or am I understanding this the opposite of its intention -- that the only real mining hardware supported in Tenebrix is commonplace CPUs?

Because the more proprietary and costly hardware becomes for effective mining, the more the larger percentage of mining will fall into the hands of few people which equates to eventual monopoly or central control.

If you keep the hardware selection rather wide (as it is with Bitcoin), it is a good idea IMO to severely limit the total coin supply -- this seems to me to be in place to directly address the problem of eventual monopoly over the network.  I think the idea is that by the time any entity gets the necessary hardware organized for monopolization, all the coins will be in circulation and then currency holders will simply subdivide and lower costs of goods / services.  This is where deflation comes in?

Actually it shouldn't matter if someone figures out how to use FPGAs or GPUs to mine tenebrix. The faster the network goes, the higher the difficulty, unless someone fairbrixes tenebrix, haha.

In 2 years time, if Moore's law continues, CPU speed will double anyway, thus driving difficulty upwards?

Isn't the algorithm supposed to generate 1 block every 5 minutes => 7200 bricks/day ?

At current prices of 0.0016 btc / tbx that's just over 4200 btc per year... which in the big scheme is nothing.

No, you're somewhat thinking on a price-abstracted level, that's the "pwoblem"

Let's see... Imagine a Tenebrix specialized mining device that costs Y dollars (just making custom gadgetry, not to consider the R&D costs) and outperforms, let's say, an i7-based rig by a factor of 100.

However, an i7 rig costs 0.0001Y. Thus, ceteris paribus, the dude with Specialized Mining Device would be inferior since his box is so damn expensive.

CPUs are cheap due to economies of scales involved in their production, which imposes a  combination of maximum price / minimum Performance Increase Factor any other device must have to compete.

So far, there is only family of semi-specialized gadgetry that might have the "right" combination of price and performance  that hypothetically might make them a bit better at TBX that CPUs are APUs which are basically "angry CPUs on horse  GPU steroids".

Also, you may accuse me of any number of things, but "miner hostility is not one of them"  - if anything, you can run TBX on the CPU of your GPU-mining rig at idle priority, thus mining both TBX and any GPU-coin at the same time. TBX literally puts a miner in your miner so you can mine while you mine.



See above

Also, consider this - CPUs GPUs and FPGAs all have uses outside mining TBX so should you quit mining, you can sell them.

Dedicated custom-designed TBX cruncher will be almost useless at anything else, making economic prospects of dedicated TBX mining devices even more unsound.


I think you confuse problem of monopolization of coin supply (and bitcoin supply is already oligopolistic, with about 5-7 pools running all the show) and the issue of (not really sorta-kinda) deflation which is another can of worms.


The appeal of TBX is that you are likely to be able to get quite some by using the spare cycles your mining rig is just wasting while you mine other coins, your employer's equipment which is far more likely to be CPU-dominated and not GPU-dominated, and your PS-3 which might be somewhere around a high-end Phenom CPU in terms of Tenebrix prowess.

And yes, TBX adoption is intended to be sperad-out among a greater number of smaller, CPU-loving devices, and not relatively rare and expensive GPU-centric machines or some lab-borne exotica.

Fortunately, current state of affair is that the majority of specialized TBX equipment would be economically unsound.

Great idea -- good thing I opted for a Athlon 2 instead of a Sempron in my mining rig :-D


I was just alluding to a small money supply leading to deflation.  I assume deflation to be a good thing, but I suppose some would disagree.

Maybe I should put "we put a miner in your miner so you can mine while you mine" somewhere on the site ?


The thing with x-flation arguments in bitcoin/altcoins is that what (would eventually happen) to BTC isn't real deflation, and isn't even "monetary" deflation in the way it usually happened in history.

Also, classical economic arguments simply cannot apply because bit-coinomy (and x-coinomy) isn't a proper "autonomous" State economy, but is a kind of thing that dwells inside State economies and "in places between them".

BTW, since the amount of criticism I receive for removing the upper coin generation limits is about twice the amount I receive for premine (I just on principle no longer read PMs and emails that have words inflation/deflation in them because quite frankly I feel like I'm trying to generate proof of work based on re-iteration of same arguments), I am thinking of tweaking TBX and GEG in a manner that it will have an additional "pseudo-deflationary" factor without cutting miner subsidies (principles are principles)

P.S.:
Also, monopolization (or at least, stronger oligopolization) of supply is virtually guaranteed to lead to increase in per-coin price irrespective of whether there is an upper "production ceiling" or not

So you are looking to cash out soon I assume ?

No.

I intend to start a huge abstract-quasi-value-token "laundry" (aka Geist and Brix Transaction History Exchange Society) , which would be quite unprecedented at this scale. I would also like to implement it in a fairly innovative manner, but that I can't say much about yet (Unlike certain someone, I only make claims I know for certain to be at least theoretically possible)

This. Would raise the price of TBX to hundreds ! Much more than BTC. Let us all be honest, the point of these currencies : they are begging for some illegal activity coming their way. Little use for normal people like you and me but huge use for nefarious purposes. Bring on the moneyzzz  ;D !!!

I am a graphic designer, not a cop or a judge, so I cannot assess the legality of activities of my future service's users, especially relative to laws of jurisdictions I have never been to, and never will.

I do however think that the unique position of launching a "neo-coin" grants one the ability to procure a huge mass of coins and forever lock them in a huge "relatively clean coin buffer" for just such a service, and operate said service in a manner that nominally, that mass of coins remains out of market proper forever.
Such set-up would allow the "laundry" to guarantee the client that they will never receive "their own" coins from the service, that the coins they get will always have a history completely unbound from their preceding activities.

I believe opportunity for creation of such a service to be unique and far more worthy than "premining a reasonabl-ish amount and/or leveraging first-adopter privilege, then cashing out"

P.S.:
Also, good sir, I can handle being accused of various unwholesome things - my hide is thick, but by insinuating that I am "normal people", you have insulted me greatly.

All of the reasons to do tenebrix apply to fairbrix and solidcoin2.  So, why get on a chain with 6 years worth of mining awarded to one person?  I'm positive bitcoin wouldn't be where it is today had Satoshi simply given himself a six year bonus upfront.

Also, I'm unconvinced the algorithm is not viable on a GPU.  It seems to scale with clock rate of my CPU and number of GPUs.  Just like a normal bitcoin miner.  I'll look further this weekend but first impression is it should run well enough on GPU -- it's just that nobody has ported the C code to OpenCL yet.

Please roll this laundry service ASAP because that is what we need to get the value high enough etc. !!! Cannot wait for tenebrix to reach 100 usd !!

Well, did Satoshi intend to launch a huge transaction-mixer ?

Also, he didn't give it to himself upfront but got it nonetheless - not that anyone should give a fuck because unless he's batshit loco, he has a vested interest in not crashing BTC market.


Dear sweet Cthulhu in the sea, we have a whole thread about how does TBX behave on GPUs in the alt. forum.
Please discuss it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45849.0

I am currently standing by for some expert feedback, then, should it turn out to be in the "can be done with crypto already used in x-coins" range, I will publish a very general raw description for people to poke holes in. After that, I will need some code power

BTW, the laundry will be opensource, so people who so desire will be able to roll a BTC one (though of course, they won't have a huge-arse buffer to guarantee "history unbinding")

+1

Maybe you should make your own chain.  It can't be that difficult.

To be sure, but the the ceiling is supposed to counteract inflation, right?  Once the maximum amount has been "minted", then deflation happens and prices of goods / services drop, right?  And that's why BTC is divisible to eight places right?  I'm just trying to make sure I understand the fundamentals.

It is pretty easy, that's why the alt chains are popping up like daisies.  Fairbrix and SolidCoin2 look good enough right now without me adding yet another chain to fragment the already limited support for alt chains.

Basically, something like that.

What you have to "grok" though, is that bicoins (and other coins) are not gold chunks that can magically travel by hitching a ride on electrons in the wires, they are unprecedented things that are best described as abstract, individually unique counterfeit-proof constructs created by means of complex mathematical computations and maintained in a rather unusual distributed database.

They are not gold and don't even really approximate "practical" behavior of gold (for starters, the excavation of gold is virtually guaranteed to not only remain stable, but to actually accelerate for the foreseeable future, while bitcoins will exhibit a sharp and unavoidable drop in production in our lifetimes...), and are distinct from (nearly?) any commodity due to being essentially infinitely divisible (the "8 decimal places" limit is arbitrary and can be programatically upgraded to "whatever number of places you feel like" with relatively little grief) and infinitely re-nominable (with same ease, you could move the dot the other way and trade Kilobitcoins and Megabitcoins, which by the way sound quite sweet)

And finally, coin-conomy is not a proper "state-like" economy as usually assumed in various x-flation arguments, and frankly I doubt that it could be, even in theory.

So all the usual arguments about coin-flation assume things about them 'coinsiz that are plainly wrong.

But I don't really mind deflation (technically, even my coins have it, and might get some more if I can seduce someone to code in a certain non-miner-offending pseudo-deflationary influence for a bounty in GG). What I find mind is the stale mindset that demands that every alt-coin have it implement the bitcoin way "BCoz it iz ze right way!1!"  (with all due respect, it is currently not practically known what are the mid, let along long term, effects of cutting miner subsidy in a system dependent on said miners for its very operation and prone to  "spirals of  doom" in case of their mass exodus)