Bitcoin/bitcoind is the node software to participate in the network.  It doesn't do remote mining.  You need a mining client if you want to use a pool.

Ditto.

People trust bitcoin because the math is so difficult that it requires a lot of time, even when the entire world gets together to throw a massive amount of computing power at the hashing.

It really makes no difference if a thousand people are participating in mining, or a billion.  What matters is that it can't be faked.

1) The pool posts an address to be used for generation.  This could be on the website, or through RPC.
2) A node takes that address, and forms a block using it as the generation address.
3) The miner gets that work from the local node and starts working.
4) The miner gets a candidate, and sends it to the local node, plus another copy to the pool server.
5) The pool verifies that the generation address is the one published, and assigns credit to the miner.
6) When the block is found, it goes out through the local node as usual, and the pool notices it, and pays the miners.

No, I forgot to read that article I linked, but I found another that you might like.

I'm done.

To the original poster: please don't burn your apartment building down.

Here are the things that need to be done to get this idea working in the real world:

1) The standard client must be modified to accept an address for the generation transaction.
2) Mining clients (and/or the flex proxy) must be modified to send another copy of each found block (share) to a second server.
3) New pool software (or a mod of an existing pool) to accept these block copies.

DC wattage is voltage times amps.

AC wattage is voltage times amps times the power factor.

The 80% thing is a design rule that an electrician has to follow if he wants the wiring to pass inspection.

Wtf?    

If this was true, houses would burn down and need to be rebuilt every couple of months.  Eventually, people would figure out the problem and start putting 12 amp breakers in, or wiring capable of actually handling 15 amps.  Oh, wait, we picked option 2 decades ago.

Watts isn't a meaningful term for talking about AC circuits, except that it is usually sorta close.  The real amount of power that a circuit can deliver is measured in Volt-Amps.  A 15 amp circuit can handle 1800 VA nominally, but if your voltage it is amperage that trips the breaker, not power, so if your voltage is low, you won't get as much power.

I'm sorry man, I just can't understand what it is that you are trying to say.  I think you are upset that you missed the goldrush.  But we can't make the block hashing easier just to give you another shot at mining riches.

Sorry, wasn't trying to derail.

I still just don't see that the problem, to the extent that I see a problem at all, is something that can be solved in this way.  If you are teaching a child math, and they don't understand how to divide 3 by 7, you don't tell him that 3 is really 3,000,000 frobnitzs.  Instead you show him how to use the tools that already exist (fractions and decimals).

Keep in mind that the most significant bits are on the right.  The first hash has a leading zero, which is actually a trailing zero.  It is important to the second round.

I think that a lot of the confusion comes from thinking that there is just the one true next block and everyone is trying to find the one.

That isn't how it works.  There are many blocks that could be the next one.  The difficult part is finding one out of the much huger number of blocks that aren't difficult enough.

Each node builds up a list of pending transactions, and they pick some or all of them to go into the new block.  Once they have their list of accepted transaction, they calculate the hash of a Merkle tree for that list.  One of these transactions is unique to that node too, because it is the generation transaction, and everyone gets to pick their own account for the reward.  So, even if everyone had the same rules for picking and ordering transactions, they would all be starting from different places anyway.

For many potential blocks, there is no value of the nonce that will give a hash less than the target.  When that happens, the node must alter something in the block header and try again.  The timestamp is a good candidate, since it usually takes some time to try all 2^32 nonces.  New transactions may have come in across the network that can be added to the tree too.

I could have sworn there was also a nonce in the Merkle tree calculations, but I can't find any references to it now.  Ahh, theymos found it while I was typing.  It is in the generation transaction, which changes the Merkle hash.

In a pool, the pool server will hand out unique headers to each worker/request, by using the extraNonce and rehashing the tree, to prevent duplication of work and get better odds of finding a valid block.

Why wouldn't the attacker wait for you to decrypt the wallet (so that you can use it), and then read the private keys out of memory?

There is another one in the Merkle root.

If a miner burns through every possible nonce in the block header without success (which is most of the time), it reports that to the node, which updates the Merkle nonce and hash (it might also reconsider which transactions to include and possibly a new timestamp), and starts over.

Considering that we will have several decades of warning of the impending need to switch precisions, I still think it will be trivial to upgrade the entire network.

Changing the generation scheme to give more than 21 million coins would also be technically trivial, but the social effects would destroy the whole system.

htole32 and friends are the newfangled way of changing byte orders.  They are only in glibc 2.9 or higher.

To get around this, open up server.c and msg.c, and paste this in below the long block of #includes


Note that I haven't tested it beyond getting pushpool to compile.  I'm only about 90% sure I got the ordering right.

Holy crap, that passes for content these days?  Ugh, I'm glad I've never read that site before, and I think I'll continue never reading it.

Please note that your proposal does nothing to solve the real problem here:  shitty 'journalism'.

Pretty much.  With a bigger pool, you get more frequent smaller payments.  With a smaller pool, you get less frequent larger payments.  Sorta.  In practice, you probably make a tiny, tiny fraction more in a larger pool, over time, than you would in a smaller pool.

The naming pattern we have now is not a problem in real life.

It is only possible for a person to imagine that the BTC is indivisible if they've never even heard about bitcoins.  Every single thing that I've seen that displays bitcoins does so with at least a couple digits after the decimal, starting with the stock client, the faucet, Mt Gox, the block explorer, every single mining pool website, etc, etc.

Where are you finding people that both 1) have heard of bitcoins, and 2) think they are atomic and indivisible?

And like half of the Internet.  Oh, wait...

Want the know the simple reason that everyone uses the dollar as a reserve currency?  It is because all the others options are even worse.