I am actively working on an update to the client.  In particular, I am including anti-strip-mine technology.  I could use someone to bounce questions off of.

I have developed technology to prevent strip-mining.  I have done most of the testing that I can do in one shop alone.  I have some other tasks, such as how to release a windows client that I need to gain control over.  I am not worried about strip mining.

The block-chain has multiple instances when blocks were mined every few minutes when the difficulty dropped, then the hash-power was removed after an Interval (2016 blocks).  I am not sure off the top of my head how quickly blocks were mined in the interval before the current one, but the chain was clearly abandoned when the difficulty increased.  Beyond that, I myself don't care who the strip-miner was.

This week, I bought a cable modem and a separate router.  I flashed OpenWRT onto the router, and spent some time getting a satisfactory initial configuration.

Today, I temporarily switched my upstream from a static IPv4 address to a DHCP IPv4 address, which will change from time to time.  My DNS provider does support dynamic IP, so eventually this should work ok.  I am still paying for the static IPv4 service, so I can back down if it is unworkable.

Today, and for a while, I am test deploying the DHCP IPv4 configuration.  In the moment, the DNS entry for seed.bte.vima.austin.tx.us is updated to the correct value.  I made an outgoing connection,
and now I have several incoming connections.  I think things are workable, at least until my provider assigns me a new DHCP address.

This is all to save $12 / month cable router rental fee.  I probably spent 40 hours on minutia.  I don't think this was a fiscally sound move, but I am satisfied.

I made a dns entry, faucet.bte.vima.austin.tx.us = 34.233.28.56

It looks like several people have tried the faucet.  Let me offer a suggestion.  Edit your post above and put a dedicated address into it.  Then if someone is careless, no coins are destroyed.

I am making cost containment changes to my internet situation. 
The good news is that I got 3x the bandwidth for a reduction of $30 / month.
More good news is that I bought a new router, an Archer C7, and flashed it with OpenWRT.

The bad news is that nothing goes smoothly.  Please stand by.

May I add this to the DNS lookup for seed.bte.vima.austin.tx.us?

I'm program.  I am pretty deep into hardening the client against strip-mining.  I occasionally have questions on data structures, type changes, and the like.

I have some scripts that build a VM on an Ubuntu box, apt-get the necessary support stuff, and build the client.  It is not completely turn-key, but that is the goal.  Each new VM is a clone of the others, so I can do clean builds, and simply erase a VM for cleanup.  Of course, there are little bugs that I don't know about, because I wrote the thing and I have work habits that don't expose them to me.

git@github.com:a-mcintosh/Trusty-preseed.git


A test of that VM would be for you to clone and build ahmed's repository.  My diffs are against his work.

git@github.com:ahmedbodi/bytecoin.git


One thing on my wish list is to do the apt-gets in the VM build process so that I can also make the Windows .EXE.

One of my efforts has the SHA-256 of the binary be signed by the builders Bytecoin address and then scp'd back to me.  This is probably in disrepair, because I don't do regression testing each day.  It may also not be in the github, because I have not released much while I am testing.

It might make sense to join #altcoin-dev on freenode.

You should be able to open a debug window.  In Linux, there is a help dropdown menu and it gives a debug window option.
The debug option is another panel, with an "information" and a "console" option.
In the console option, you can type "getpeerinfo"  and it will give some summary information about each connection, including whether it is inbound.

It is 16:44 UTC.  I have 3 connections, all inbound to me.  My debug.log has a long list of "connection refused" entries.  My interpretation is that no one else is accepting inbound connections.

I don't have any outbound connections.  I am a single point of failure.  <--- very bad.

At 2018-04-16 16:46:35 I had 0 connections.  I restarted the client and received an incoming connection within a minute.

I went from 6 connections to 0 connections in a few hours this morning.  I haven't found anything wrong at my end.

I have a process to make a VirtualBox VM, install Ubuntu Trusty and the necessary extra files,
and make the Linux binary.  The system is close to turnkey.

I wonder if you would be willing to supply the additional "apt-get install <stuff>" and any
necessary glue support so that I can make a Windows executable.

I checked my debug.log just now.  I have 29 addresses that I am sending out.

Your 9,999 addresses might be from an earlier version of peers.dat,
Another node might have handed them to you.

I recommend adding the following to your bytecoin.conf file:

logtimestamps=1


and renaming your peers.dat file, perhaps to peers-1522685035-124.dat or some other equally unique name, then restart your client and see who you are getting these stale peers from.

I have thought of several re-branding ideas.  Here is one now.  I can't get an image link to show the image in the posting.  Maybe there is some rule my image breaks, but anyway here is a link.

The ticker symbol would be IOU

https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipP4Xi3AYB03j8XogRmoI8E4znL_7iDbNbabIMhl/photo/AF1QipNMjf97kuW3ps5zTF-4J6r-dwWsQVB32PEh4Fww


I made a Linux binary in mid 2017, and it is what you connect to when you reach my seed node.  It is totally legacy BTE technology, with the new artwork and name included, and instead of presenting BTE, mBTE, μBTE as display units, it presents kIOU, IOU, and mIOU.  

There are a couple of justifications for the larger numbers.
1.  As the same technology as Bitcoin, it should have the same value at equilibrium.  Let's set that expectation.
2.  Bitcoin was at about USD 1,000 / BTC 1 when I compiled the binary.  So it presented as 1 IOU = 1 USD.
3.  This is all experimental changes in my lab, "thinking out loud" as it were.

It makes it look like you have 1,000x more.  "Mine goes to 11"  I also made a version of a client that had a "g_Au" presentation option.  That implies all sorts of things, but I am just playing with ideas, not seriously advocating anything at the moment.

You are almost certainly speaking of BCN, not BTE.

Can you show any public evidence that it existed before April 1, 2013?  Private notes released afterward do not count.

The mining does not cause problems.  Please use your best judgement.

Do you have a Linux environment available?

(Usually I edit carefully.  "She" doesn't like me, and I went and had beer.  Last time someone posted under those conditions, we got the term "HODL")

I wish I could see the future for answers.

I have a lot of coins, and it is strongly in my interest for them to have value.  Today, I think that they don't.

I think the choice is between disruptive change, and a chain that was stagnant for almost 18 months and will be strip-mined again when profitable.  That is a hard choice, but I don't see a different way to slice it.

On the code changes I am driven by only a few things.  1)  I don't like special cases, 2)  It takes many fewer hashes to repair the blockchain at about difficulty 1 than to finish the current and next interval to get the difficulty low.  I figured it would take maybe $500 of electricity or hash rental to get the difficulty low again.  I also want to give a block reward to the current miners as they mine the repair.  This was a bit tricky to detail out.

My plan is to offer a fork and honestly list what I think the advantages are.  Where-ever people put their hashes, that is where the future goes.  I am deliberately indifferent as to which is chosen, keep in mind that I am hosting and facilitating a seed node on the legacy situation.

I will work strongly to what I think is a best solution, but it is always the choice of others to use it, or to stay with the strip-mined chain.

The blunt truth is that the current client is vulnerable to strip-mining.  While there may be a way to remove that vulnerability and keep total compatibility for the foreseeable future, I don't know that solution after 4 years of thinking.  So I am working on a minimal change version.  I have a lot of ideas for "improvements" but as an experienced person I resist their temptation.  I don't know what will happen during field test.  That is a scary time for a programmer.  All I can do is make a strong effort and see what happens.

I do think that all the alt-coins that rely on the original Satoshi client are vulnerable to strip mining.  I think this is important technology to develop, whether the BTE group itself adopts it or not, and whether the core developers like it or not.

I do plan to pursue this as long as I think it is technically viable, in venues including and also other than the BTE group.  I will make announcements 1st in the BTE group while they are still open to my changes.

As to whether you should keep mining.  I can be accused of a conflict of interest if I give a crisp answer to that.  I also don't really know.  I could have a heart attack or be shot by a jealous boyfriend tomorrow, and you would wish you had kept mining.  The minute I release my software I hope you will mine some on the repaired blockchain, but otherwise I think I need to remain silent.

Please raise all the objections that you can think of.  I am working in a bubble, and I may have missed something important and obvious.

Somewhere in storage, I have an Avalon 2, 83 GH/s.  We are already using air conditioning in Austin.  I can rent hashes, if I run a stratum pool.  I figured the cost to mine to the next difficulty change, and decided to write code to fix the problem once and for all instead.