Bitcoin Forum

Two WebCL miners have been released.  They connect to a private back end or to a pool.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9876.0
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9891.0

These are going to put mining in the hands of millions of non-technical users (especially once WebCL ships with a popular browser) and even web site visitors (and probably malware victims).  

The JavaScript web miners were a nice technical achievement, but were much too slow to have any significant effect on overall mining.  This is different.  These WebCL miners are competitive with GPU mining rigs.  We need to make sure now that WebCL mining is available, it is widely available, without being controlled by a few developers or pool operators.

Let's offer a bounty for an open source WebCL miner.  

Current pledges:

10 BTC smooth
15 BTC freeborn

25 BTC Total

Requirements:

TBD

EDIT: Add pledges and requirements sections

This is a great Idea, I think its worth at-least a few thousand BTC. :D

Hey nothing personal.  I applaud your work.  It's just that if a few WebCL miners end up controlling millions of PCs, that's not good for any of us.

I don't really think this project is that hard.  There are already open source OpenCL miners that can be ported, so this is really just a good opportunity for someone who wants to do a bit of JavaScript coding.

I would definitely open source my work for 500BTC.

I would open source a WebCL miner for 100BTC

send donations here if interested: 15Q7hoGhfuwXCUMUk9tEaoru34vXHNBPUU

I updated kradminer.com with the following:

Open Source

The people demand it! But will they put their Bitcoin where there finger is? I will open source Krad Miner for 500BTC. All BTC above and below this amount fund my continued work on the XMMS2 project (Video) and other projects such as my network FLAC and CELT streaming programs.

http://github.com/oneman

Bitcoin Address: 13buRFcMxDtxFZHeEAFJ6K92aXoagxrBVP

http://blockexplorer.com/address/13buRFcMxDtxFZHeEAFJ6K92aXoagxrBVP

I think a bounty is the way the go here, to motivate one person to actually do it, rather than sending a few BTC to each of several developers who may never release any open source.

Of course, anyone who wants to tip you guys is welcome to do it.  But for anyone who wants an open source WebCL miner, post your bounty commitments on this thread.

MIT or GPL3 License, whatever is wanted.

I'd like to hear what the coined.com author is looking for.

the webcl code is freely available, why bother paying so much to get it open sourced?

I don't think it should cost very much.

Well so far I've been offered about 50BTC and got nothing.

Surely it isn't worth supporting some guy who spends ungodly amounts of time contributing to open source.

Its crazy for someone who writes software that literally makes making money easier would ask really anything substantial for it.

Seems more like a stick em up than a bounty at this moment.

If we could get to 150 id open it up then, in some hope maybe some early adopters that actually benifit from coins being harder to get might throw a few :)

Either MIT or BSD would be my vote.... GPL can lick my boot.

I understand where you are coming from, but in this case I don't really think it matters since the WebCL and JavaScript source goes out to every user's browser anyway (unless someone wanted to try to obfuscate it I guess -- unrolled SHA256 xCL code is pretty well obfuscated already if you ask me :) ).

Anyway, for my part of the bounty, I don't object to any of these licenses.

How much are you committing to the bounty? 

coined author not responding?

He may not know this thread is here.  I'll post on his thread to let him know.

EDIT: looks like Luke-Jr did that already.

I'll likely be opening up my code in the near future. The system is not quite where I wanted it when I announced it, but rawdod put on some pressure by announcing his. If I do release before anyone else, then any bounty here would be appreciated and enable me to dedicate more time to the project.

Free market competion rulez!  ;D

That'd be awesome as, IMO, his ransom is a bit steep. I'll contribute some as soon as I get another chance to obtain some BTC.  :)

Just because someone publishes it doesn't mean you can copy it.

Thanks for all the hard work on the webCL miners!  Count me in for 10btc.

also have preference for BSD license.


edit:

thought I should add a requirement or two
* Should work with atleast a few different combinations of browsers-OSs-GPUs, with plans to work on as many as possible
*Configuration options, How would someone connect this to a pool or standalone client

I don't think it is possible to work with different browsers right now because only Firefox has a WebCL plugin.

Essentially the same kind of code will run on any browser once WebCL becomes standardized.

I can't meet a long list of requirements, but I can provide a working starting point for the effort and will even do a short write up to make sure the project gets off on the right foot.

Modifying this to be compatible with arbitrary pools and what not is a straitforward task. The 'hard' parts in my opinion are just battling with the strangeness of the javascript environment. I have been coding for a decade, and I find C easier to debug than Javascript.

I'll open source it today if you guys can come up with 75 coins.

If you think about it, your using an open source money system using money generated by open source software to buy open source software, and its pretty much cheap if you have been mining.

The thing is, all the miners out there now, really don't want to see this project existing, because it makes mining too easy, if this was several months from now and WebCL was standard, your looking at Linux based miners high on cryptography getting out done by hoardes of 13 year old girls on facebook running this unknowingly just to buy virtual dresses in a princess game whist the shadowy company behind it profits immensely.

rawdod, I think your offering a awesome deal.  I want to bring my contribution up to 15btc(hopefully some others chip in as well).  I wish I began mining sooner,  I would snatch this offer up in a second.   Good luck.

Time to buy shares in firefox ?


 :D

http://coined.com/  < just saw.. another webcl miner

I am getting less the 1/3rd of what gui miner is making when using kradminer and coined  was only making about 500 khash/s when i am getting a steady 930 mhash/ in guiminer.

I love this idea does anyone know why the rates are so poor, or do I just need to let them run for a longer period of time?

Updated: Desktop Lag should be fixed, however the hashrate might jump around and be under-reported.

In actuality the hashrate is probably 85% the speed of guiminer for ATI users and exactly the same speed for nvidia users.

But let me know how it runs on your system. Try not to confuse mhash and khash when reporting, I display both to hopefully teach the correlation...

Just an update since the forums are so fast moving these days, and this ones a little slower, I've added experimental multi-gpu support.

Please test and provide feedback!


http://kradminer.com?device=1 (http://kradminer.com?device=1)   (for the second card )

http://kradminer.com?device=2 (http://kradminer.com?device=2)   (for the third card )

http://kradminer.com?device=3 (http://kradminer.com?device=3)   (for the forth card ...)


Once I know it works as I expect it to, I will add it to the interface.

http://kradminer.com (http://kradminer.com) (for single gpu folks like me ;P)