Yes, at least three things are missing from the equation:
- Time to move data into the GPU. I've tested my alg doing the same sha2 (so only one 64 byte transfer in) and got ~100MHs. Compare that to the 6MHs I get with the full implementation.
- We are actually doing 2 sha calculations, so halve your expected times.
- To avoid transferring all hashs back to the system memory, the comparison of the result hash against the target difficulty is done on the GPU, which takes a slice of time there too.

Of course implementations can be very optimized, all loops unrolled, memory used more efficiently. But the target should never be anything over 25% of the sha1 test, I'd say.

I, personally, think that we are poking the wrong people way too early in the game... I mean, we are giving the tools to those who:
1) most desire to be able to prevent taxation and control from the governments
2) pay a large bill to said governments every year

If we are trying to get the attention of the legislators, on the other hand, that it's the right way to do it imo.

*ducks*

"It is OpenCL"? I'm guessing the bounty starter meant either cuda or opencl, but although I only have nvidia (and cuda is so much less verbose) I think an opencl version would be more appropriate.

You probably need the listtransactions patch. Can you build? If not, what platform are you on?

So, how much interest is there in this? I *could* put a little effort in making something a bit more generic than my osx version, and I don't even need a bounty or donation. It's a simple math problem, as the coins I'd need to ask to make this monetarily worthwhile are simply not going to be offered, so I'd rather do this for the community's sake.  Donations are appreciated, but judging by how much I got from the implementation I posted (a hefty sum of 0), I don't think that is going to tilt my balance anytime soon

On the other hand, are there any takers? I'd offer my support and my code to whomever wants to make this happen in a short period of time.

I don't. I want to accept a transaction using a provided key and immediately transfer that out to some address. Running without a wallet is kind of an eufemism.

So basically I send a transaction to an address that I own, but no client has, not even mine. That transaction gets into the next block and will be confirmed, but never collected.
Time passes, I provide that key to someone (QR code, email, smoke signals, morse code, whatever) and they want to collect. Notice I didn't transfer to that person, neither did I use a 3rd party payment processor.
Of couse, after providing the private key to that person I can still use it myself, but then that person has the option to, be it by a new feature in the client or by some service provided in the web, say "here's a key, transfer all that it has to my bc address". After that is done, I no longer hold any value in that priv key.

The reasons why I think this is useful are, for now, only mildly disclosed, but can we, technically, do it?

Heh, TTBit was meaning to get you playing on the Pick6, but the lottery draw also needs some attention

No, it's nothing personal, and I'm not thinking about getting in the race, for sheer lack of time, and because I get obsessed very easily (I pulled an all nighter with my implementation, and it had been a while since I last did that). Join the two and I'm the perfect guy to do this, only I need to work on the other, less important types of income

I'm just saying that stating "I'll donate X" is not the same as having an account with X times the people that donated, psychologically speaking. And having that account held by a well established party helps wiz newcomers consider taking the bounty, that's all.

If I'm to do it, you can hold my bounty, I trust you

And with what I assume was your bet, we have reached the bit 1K. There's 1000 Bitcoins to collect, people. Don't be shy, there's still plenty of tickets to sell

woot, finally someone steps up! I wish I had the time, as it's a ton of fun to optimize code like this. But to be taken seriously you'll need a trusted wallet keeper to collect all donations, serving as escrow. I could make mine (assuming a CUDA only solution) work for linux and mac in a couple of days, but my employers wouldn't be too happy about it!

Windows? I have no idea, would need to set up a build machine and that I'm not looking forward to :p

But anyone wants to pick up where I left?

People, I'm getting tired of PM'ing to warn that I'll do this, so I'll just go ahead and do it:

DO NOT POST YOUR BTCOUT! That is your log in to the page. For those of you that already did, please go into the lottery account page and change it to another address you own. Give TTBit either you BTCIN or a personal address, just not the one you register with the lottery!

Also, don't forget to set a password while you're there. You don't need it to login, but you do to change the btcout. This way other people can bet your coins if that grab your address, but they can't withdraw them.

Sorry if I didn't make that clear enough before.

Are we really discussing intelectual property licenses now? I mean, really???

There's this friend of mine, who I greatly admire, that says that "the world is not made of laws, but of people". When we need to hide behind license agreements and we didn't even leave the neighborhood, something is really rotten. While I must say that puddinpop has a point, he can actually licence sw based on MIT core in whatever or whichever way he feels good about, I just think that making a point of it goes to show a bit about his education towards open source and its beliefs.

So, in my mind, we get a 10000 BC bounty for him, he makes us a pretty opencl version and then states he found a way to increase hashing, 10 fold... but now he wants 10 fold the bounty! I'm off this thread now, I hear my conscience calling me.

Yes, the community prefers to work with people that have the open source mindset unless there's no expertise in it, or the closed source is amazingly better that all others. But hey, that's just me

Your code may be great, and your heart in the right place when you say "convince me to open source", but the paragraph you just wrote spells out "either you pay me or I'm not releasing the hostages". The pun regarding ransomware is well intended, but in a satirical and well intentioned manner! I told you, I understand perfectly what you are trying to achieve, we are all going for the same thing. It's the route you chose that I'm not comfortable with.

So you are running a PIII?

Just kidding, but that is kind of slow. I do ~1400000 on my mac using the CPU (that's an i5), around 6200000 using my cuda enabled GPU and custom code and on a Q6600@2.4 OC'd to 3.0, I crunch ~5000000.

There's a makefile.mingw, and although I haven't tried yet, I'll probably take a stab at windows building for my cuda miner. Can I not use this?

Check.


Ok, so there are 2 elements in play here, addresses and transactions. Addresses are safe so as long as I do as described above, but transactions may be lost? Outgoing transactions are not a problem, obviously, as loosing them means only that the coins don't go out, so using a previous backup would show the correct amount before transaction.
But incoming transactions could be a problem? So someone sends me coins, I receive the transaction and then loose my wallet. I still have the address and key, so shouldn't the transaction be replayed when I parse all blocks again?

The means by which transactions get transported are the blocks, right? There's no out of band communicating of transactions between clients?

This is, I believe, the biggest separator between bitcoin backers and mildly curious people; those who believe that bitcoins do infact have intrinsic value, if only for philosophical reasons, or even privacy concerns, don't use BCs to get EUR or USD. It's the other way around. You think in terms of country currency because that's what you use to buy bread and gas, but my personal take is that bitcoins are their own value. Sure, you can't do much with them right now, but think about a month ago... there was no lottery

Bitcoins ARE a detour if you want to go from USD to USD (or whatever currency you use). But that is NOT what bitcoins are about at all.

Hey, so making my Lottery more disaster resilient, and taking on satoshi's backupwallet feature, I just wanted to double check I'm doing the right thing (tm).

My understanding is that the only important information on the whole set of bitcoin client data files is the private keys, one per incoming address. And all of these are stored in wallet.dat. Everything else, including the transactions themselves, is stored in every other bitcoin client running on the network. Is this correct?

Now, when does the information on the wallet.dat change, in a way that it makes our last backup ineffective? I'm guessing on every sent transaction, as bitcoin automatically creates a new receiving address for the transaction change portion, and everytime we create a new address.
Incoming transactions don't create new keys, do they? So I can safely receive without creating a new backup...

As a side thought, the import / export of keys has been mentioned now and then on the threads I follow. Would it be possible / practical to export all new keys from a wallet (passing an id from last backup, or the last key from the last backup) so we have granularity, and then be able to recreate a wallet by importing each of the pieces?

webservices in mind, this (efficient and effective backup) is the most critical point imho.

Hehe, we'll see... You are welcome to get into our friendly wager