Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking too. Even on a 100 megabit fiber, no network is invincible to a ton of people wanting to all download at the same time.

I could, got plenty of servers (would only take one though) available to task for that, at least for the Linux clients. I'm sure I could dig up a windows server to do the same thing, just zip up the blocks upload them to the FTP every hour or so. Can't help the Mac people I'm afraid, all of my Mac are PPC, don't have an Intel based one anywhere to generate with, sorry Mac gurus   

Just as the subject says.

A lot of new users (or those that want to run multiple computers with the client) have to wait until the client syncs up with the rest of network before any transactions can take place (or coin generating).

So, for those technical people, I've packed up the bitcoin block into a zip file that has all of the blocks as of the time I created them just a few minutes ago. All this will do is save you some time on getting a fresh install of the client up to date with the rest of the network.

This is meant only for new installs, wouldn't recommend dumping this on top of an existing install that you've been running for a while (as they were extracted from new blanks). While it's just simple to dump this zip files on top of the bitcoin data folder, it's still a bit technical so I wouldn't recommend this for non-technical people.

This is merely for convenience and to help get new users up and running quicker. I'm sure the devs here probably already have something like this planned for the future, but until then I'm all for helping the community.

The download link is in my signature below, so if this helps to save you or your friends time, consider donating a few coins to the cause.  

[Edit]
Find files here: http://knightmb.dyndns.org/files/bitcoin/
and/or a Torrent File here (thanks to SmokeTooMuch): http://rapidshare.com/files/406964866/BitcoinBlocks.torrent.html

I've had luck with testing of packaging blocks into a zip file and dumping them on a new Bit Coin to speed up the block download process. I'll leave the link in my signature and if anyone finds it useful or time saving, feel free to donate. 

I agree, I've been looking into packaging "blocks" for download so that you can install the client, unzip a fresh stack of blocks and let the client finish off the rest to get people up and running faster. I'm experimenting with Windows and Linux clients (don't have a Mac that can run the Mac client, sorry folks)

Hopefully that will help with the issue.

Of course, the trust factor comes in (should I download these from this guy instead of letting the network do it for me)

 

It references by IP, so someone need only use a bunch of extra ones (or Tor), Bit Coin lets you generate new receive addresses all day, so they need only send to those, then funnel the BC back to their main account.

If someone is actually doing that I mean. 

It seems like that until you think about how to actually implement this. If someone came to you and said "Here's 1.5 Million Dollars, I want you to corner the Bit Coin market", would you be able to snap your fingers and it be done?

No way, it would take planning, hardware purchase, hardware setup, someone to get the client up and running, need people to get the Internet connection up, funneling the coin to whoever it was that wants it all. It would time and every second that your shadow corp isn't running, that's another random person out there generating coin and raising the bar for the coin generator.

So by the time it's all said and done, you would be going back to that person to ask for another 1 million since the network got harder while you were getting setup.

People and Corporations try to "buy" the lottery all the time. Sometimes it works, but more times it fails because you just can't buy luck.

Maybe if that person had started with 1.5 million when this project first started, but now I think it's beyond a feasible and logistics point to game the system. It's like trying to shut down the Pirate Bay now 

From what I've read, when a new block is discovered, the other machines will take a few milliseconds to verify if it's real or not first because say two people's computer discovered a solution within a second of each other. How do we know who the winner is? Well, again more luck. Other people's computers have to verify that your PC wasn't cheating/stupid/error/etc for the block. After a hundred or more confirmations, it's accepted by the "group" that your PC founding the winning block and everyone assigns the credit to your PC. So when two computers at the same time find the block, it's more luck on how fast it will be accepted by the group by how many other people's computers verify your find.

The chain is updated and if your neighbors computer was working on block 66777, it hears the news that your found the winning block and says "well, time to start on the next block" and begins the calculations over. Now your computer and your neighbors computer are working on block 66778, but each is doing it's own unique brute force. They aren't both working on the same brute force for the same block, otherwise, the fastest computer would always win over and over. The faster computer does have an advantage that it can brute force the next find faster than the slow guy, but the slow guy still has luck on his side.

Now imagine this with thousands of PCs out there playing the lotto every second. Just because you have a quad-core system churning 2,400 khash/s doesn't mean you are going to win every time. It makes your odds better of course, but by no means is it a sure thing just because of the raw CPU power you have. Ask the people at this forum who are running this on a server farm (like myself) and you'll see. I'm churning 10,000 khash/s on one of my systems (6 cpu) and it hasn't won a single block yet    I'm not bitter though, it proves to me that the system is being fair in the block generation, so I'm happy actually.

It does run faster. I've tried both the 32 and 64 bit version on Linux using the same system. You'll see about a 5% to 10% increase in speed on the 64 bit version.

Maybe not much, but every little bit helps.

Mechanical Turk 

Get people to install the client, generate some coin, send to a common address.

Yes, they do. If the old PC can only generate 1 block in 48 hours and the super fast modern PC can generate 1 block in 12 hours, then statistically, the old PC is 4 times as slow as the modern PC during coin generation. The difference is the luck factor. It's possible that the old PC will find a crypto solution by pure luck in less time. So it's possible that the old PC finds one in 2 hours while the super fast PC has to burn through the entire brute force before finding a block in 12 hours. So the advantage is the odds. Simplified of course, but yes, the faster PC gives you a 1 in 12 chance to get the solution and the old PC gives you a 1 in 48 chance (again, way over simplified example)

So the faster PC is like having a few extra lottery tickets 

I think then now would be a good point to work out a separate "server" and "client" for the next release. Those want to run servers that sit on fast fiber connections and run 24/7 (like myself) can do this for the good of the service. Those that just want to send money from point A to point B can use the client which either function as a full blown node server (like it does now) or give the option to connect to "trusted" servers in the network and just have the server do the hard work and report back to the client when coins are transfered around properly.

Since the network can be participated by both dedicated server farms and Joe Blow with his laptop, you still maintain the open network and crypto security that you need, but also offer another solution for those less technical and wanting an easy click and send interface that they have now, website payments, etc.

I mean, I'm seeing stories about Bit Coin all over the web now, so the popularity is coming quickly and people are going to poke around the source code and program, then come here to make suggestions/complaints/worship/etc.

Might as well get a head start. 

It's win/win because people can run thin clients, people can run servers, and those that don't trust either can run their own client/server/p2p application themself, but it all benefits BitCoin one way or another. 

Thanks for pointing that out, I wasn't sure how that would scale over time, was just making some guess. Given that the formula for coin generation should be known somewhere, can't someone just calculate how much disk space X amount of coins will take given XYZ transactions, etc.

I'm curious myself to how much space it will take. 

That is a good point, one I didn't think about.  So, let me think out loud here. There are a possible 21 million coins. Every time a block is generated by someone, they earn 50 coins. Right now, I see 66,618 blocks have been generated since the beginning. So that's 66618 x 50 = 3,330,900 coins so far. To reach 21 million, we need to reach 21,000,000 / 50 = 420,000 blocks. 66,618 blocks take up about 56 megabytes of hard disk space. So, perhaps 420,000 blocks (if every single coin is created) would take up about 420000 x 56 / 66618 = 353 megabytes of hard disk space.

The rest would be transaction history to make sure the owners are valid and older transactions are pruned after a while, so perhaps at full scale, this application could eat up as much as 1GB of hard disk space. So, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but even at full scale, the clients would need about 1GB of hard disk space to contain a fully generated coin network?

From what I read in the release notes, the IRC is just a bootstrap, the new version can work around IRC failure as it has an alternative (but slower) ways to sync up the first time users to the network.

Well, imagine if you will, the US and our national gross. It's somewhere in the multi-trillions last I heard. So, if everything had to be converted to dollars, that would be a trillion dollars in circulation (ignore how a complex system like a countries currency, this is way over simplifying).  No imagine all of that was to be transfered into Bit Coins? Well, there are only 21 million Bit Coins, so a 1 to 1 conversion is out of the question. Basically it would have to be scaled back to the decimal points (probably 4 places) to fit all of that in. That still leaves 4 more decimal places in which any economy working in the Quadrillion range is probably out of scope of any country in the world (or all countries combined really)

So, if you don't think of a 1 to 1 conversion for Bit Coins, because even I want to think of Bit Coins as dollars for example. But it isn't. It is it's own currency within itself whose value is only dependent on the people that use it and what value they give it. It's like that for any currency really, the only difference is, instead of the bank or government in XYZ country being the one who controls how it's created and distributed, WE *all* control how it's created and distributed.

We are *minting* the coin (through CPU cycles to generate the encryption hashes) and at the same time using it for trade and value. The only difference is, this isn't a USA currency or a Swedish currency, it's all completely electronic. The bank, the teller, the minting; is all of us at the same time. Basically, all of our clients have agreed upon certain rules to follow and as long as each client follows those rules, it can participate. Any client that doesn't (through hacking, cheating, etc.) is basically ignored by the rest. It's like playing a game of soccer where you have two teams competing and one guy just up and grabs the ball, runs down to the other side and throws the ball in. Dances up and down that he scored a point. Well, everyone else will just ignore him and his point, he wasn't playing by the set rules.  

1) Actually, from what I read in the PDF, I don't think it's necessary. It only needs to know that a transfer of *this* coin from Owner A to Owner B was valid. It doesn't matter if 1 year ago, Owner C gave Owner A that coin.

2) It's P2P, someone out there will be connected. I run a 24/7 Dedicated Server just for Bit Coin now on a Fiber connection. Not because I work with them, but because I see the need to donate the resources for the cause.

3) Don't let the 21 million limit fool you. It's more like 21000000.00000000 limit because the coin is so divisible, but for sanity reasons, it would make sense not to be trading coin in the Quadrillion Bundles 

From what I read in the Technical Paper, old transactions are compressed after a while. The Coin spending process only needs to know that transfer from Owner A to Owner B was valid. It doesn't matter if 1 year ago, Owner C gave it to Owner A. At least from what I get, it keeps the transaction history from reaching infinity.

I wish I could 

It's an Intel Arch release only, doesn't support PPC yet/will?

Add priority management to the list, so that we can start the program always in the lowest priority for example. That way, it can run on idle CPU time instead of sharing CPU time with the current system applications.

Good point. I just wanted to test if it made a difference (I suspect it will). But after reading the other topics, seems the fix was already checked into the SVN, just not in time for the release so there is no sense in me trying a fix that which is already fixed code wise, hehe.

I agree though, it just needs to run at the lowest prioirty at *all* times, I mean it's suppose to run off of idle CPU and a nice level of 2 isn't far from *shared* CPU cycles than *idle* CPU cycles in my opinion.

Yeah, I finally found it as well (I knew I shouldn't have peaked in the code, LOL). I'm going to try manually setting it to hard code 19 and see if that makes a difference after a compile. If so, it might be a more elegant solution that removing the function all together since it appears it's trying to balance out when to use more CPU depending on the system load.