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I've been thinking about this a bit more, and I thought of something. If a programmer were trying to put as many sha-256 coprocessors as possible on the same FPGA chip, and I/O was his real limitation; he wouldn't need to set it up so that the processors would report the entire hash upon success. All that would be neccessary is that the coprocessor report the nonce used to get that hash, and the cpu use that nonce once to get the proper result. So fewer pins would be required for output of each coprocessor. Also, the cpu could supply the initial nonce for each coprocessor, so a random number generator would not be neccessary, maybe? I would love to try even just one custom cut coprocessor on one of these FPGA's. Properly done, I'd bet it would be sick fast.
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I agree that it was a great article, and I'm glad that you echoed it to the forum; because when I went to that link all I ended up with was the Apache2 default webpage. Looks like this author is already facing some blowback, and perhaps someone has nuked his server. |
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What does your debug log say?
I did have this exact problem. Stuck on the 67300, wouldn't download anymore.
Guess what? My clock said January 7th 2003. Fixed that, opened it back up and they all downloaded. Check your debug log. That's where it told me the blocks were too far into the future so I looked at my clock.
That's it! My brother's clock was set wrong, it thought that it was 2001. |
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From my analysis it appears Bitcoin Market is practically dead or barely used. Is this accurate/true?
If so, is there something specific that Bitcoin Market does or doesn't do that causes it to not be as popular, successful, widely used or otherwise useful as other competing markets/exchanges? What are these things? What can help to improve Bitcoin Market so that it will be more accepted or useful to others?
The problem with the bitcoin markets is that they all use some other online payment processor, killing one major advantage of Bitcoin, the very low cost of transactions. |
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An experiment tried and failed is better than an experiment that is never tried at all.
Not always. Sometimes the cost to the greater society is harsh from an experiment gone wrong. Two such examples would be Easter Island, which destroyed itself and erased any possibilites of the rest of humanity from learning from their mistakes along the way; and the Wiemar Republic, which destroyed itself and begot a society with a very destructive meme that nearly infected all of Europe and Asia. And it doesn't appear to me that humanity learned all that much from the Wiemar Republic, either; since we appear to be starting down their same path again in the modern world. I lived in Brazil during the mid-1980's.... and it was as bad as the Wiemar Republic or even worse with a relative national debt (to national GDP) owed to foreign countries as bad or worse than what America is currently facing. Well, things sure have changed there. Brazil is one of my final 'bug out' possibilities if things really get ugly here in the States. I think that I would prefer Argentina, but sooner or later I'm going to have to pick a second language to *really* learn.
The consistent thing to learn from both lessons is that the governments which caused the crisis (speaking of governments like the American government rather than parliamentary governments... although that may also happen) usually fall apart in extremely stressful economic environments. This is a sobering thing to think about.
Sobering? Perhaps to some. It's what I'm expecting. Every few generations the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants, and that day is coming. The real question is not if it will happen in my lifetime, but do I want to participate? I'm beginning to think that I might be to old to be a captian of men by the time the thin veil of civility collapses.
The problem with the solution to the Wiemar Republic problems is that the resulting government was intolerant of other viewpoints to the point of genocide and they were willing to extend that intolerance world-wide. I hope I haven't invoked Godwin's Law just now either. Those guys usually have a funny way of creeping into any conversation on the net eventually, don't they?
They do, indeed. I know of an actual German who seems to believe that Godwin's Law doesn't apply to himself, because he is German and would know better, and has actually stated it as such. The problem is that the Third Reich is such a perfect, and widely studied in the Western nations, example of an entire culture going insane due to a shared dillusion that it's difficult to find as good an example that all readers can relate to. Certainly there are other examples, but none both so widely shared and so close in human history. |
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To remove all doubt, I went over to my brother's house to use his older Windoze machine; which isn't all that hard considering that he lives over my garage. I started the client on his computer (which uses my broadband) that I know does not have *any* security programs at all, and running over a broadband connection that does not have any blockages at all (because it's mine). The client started up fine, and within a minute was reporting 60+ connections. I'm thinking, "I'm good now", but an hour later it still had not incremented the block count even one from the blockchain that I downloaded at the same time as 0.3.10. I think is was 67,300; but it never moved. I tried to turn on and off generation, which I didn't expect to work and it didn't.
Any ideas?
I don't mean to state the obvious, but your post does not mention shutting down Bitcoin and starting it up again. When I upgraded to the new version several of my machines also stalled on the block count and restarting Bitcoin solved the problem. I think the same problem was mentioned in an earlier post and restarting also solved the problem on that occasion. Just something to try. Well, I did try restarting it, but it didn't help. I have not removed the blockchain or index files yet. |
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GSF plans on being one of the few global entities that survives the coming collapse, and the catalyst for rebuilding. That's my impression, anyway.
I think I'll copy all his stuff and declare myself sovereign of North America. That way in the post collapse aftermath, if people are stupid enough to accept him as a global leader, I'll have equal claim! No, not "leader." "Market maker", perhaps (and that's me talking). Also, these folks have been working on this for decades. They're preparing to survive the collapse of the internet, as we know it. For fictionalized accounts, read Cryptonomicon and Halting State, for example. I've never read Halting State, but I have read Cryptonomicon. But I don't get the reference. Cryptonomicon was not about surviving a future. Are you sure that, The Diamond Age wouldn't be a better reference? That entire book was about a future nearly devoid of involutary governments, but instead a set of cultures in balance and intertrading with a cryptocurrency that could not be back traced across the Internet. They are both great books, BTW. Neil Stevenson is one hell of an author. |
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An experiment tried and failed is better than an experiment that is never tried at all.
Not always. Sometimes the cost to the greater society is harsh from an experiment gone wrong. Two such examples would be Easter Island, which destroyed itself and erased any possibilites of the rest of humanity from learning from their mistakes along the way; and the Wiemar Republic, which destroyed itself and begot a society with a very destructive meme that nearly infected all of Europe and Asia. And it doesn't appear to me that humanity learned all that much from the Wiemar Republic, either; since we appear to be starting down their same path again in the modern world. |
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True, the supply of privately supplied computational power will rise to meet the demand or the computational power will decrease to meet the demand. Either way, it'll balance out in the long term. Unless we hit the 'singularity' before then, only my grandchildren will have to worry about such things. |
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How long did you wait?
I said I waited about an hour. Do they give it away free? If not, there is no way my brother has it. And if I find out that I'm wrong about that, I'm raising his rent out of spite.
What happens if you delete the blk*.dat files and try to re-download from the start of the block chain?
What is in your debug.log file?
I don't know, but those are a couple of good ideas. |
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If you want to buy stuff locally, and the net is down, you'd better have some gold and/or silver.
Personally, I prefer silver rounds. I keep them in my desk. I would recommend worrying about getting out of debt and building up your pantry closet first, however. If it ever gets to the point that I'm trading silver as the common currency, it's *already* bad enough that most people won't be willing to trade anything at all. |
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If you are still alive in 120+ years, you probably will not *personally" care to be generating blocks. However, assuming bitcoin is still running then, anyone who has a large number of bitcoins is going to still have a personal incentive to keep the currency strong; even if the transaction fees are too small to compete over.
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To remove all doubt, I went over to my brother's house to use his older Windoze machine; which isn't all that hard considering that he lives over my garage. I started the client on his computer (which uses my broadband) that I know does not have *any* security programs at all, and running over a broadband connection that does not have any blockages at all (because it's mine). The client started up fine, and within a minute was reporting 60+ connections. I'm thinking, "I'm good now", but an hour later it still had not incremented the block count even one from the blockchain that I downloaded at the same time as 0.3.10. I think is was 67,300; but it never moved. I tried to turn on and off generation, which I didn't expect to work and it didn't.
Any ideas?
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I'm not an FPGA expert, but I dabble.
Is that right? SO I guessed correctly, there is at least one member of the bitcoin community with access to at least one FPGA. Are you going to post your code now that you have been outed?
I asked some folks...
And I buy Rogaine for a friend of mine...
The upshot was that a modern desktop machine has such a huge clockspeed advantage (8 cores at 3 GHz?),
Holy crap! Are you serious? This is an average desktop these days? I'm still using a single core P3 running Ubuntu. Well, at least I was until my power supply crapped out and killed my motherboard. Can you believe they want $200 to upgrade!?
so only a massively parallel implementation would have a chance of competing.
My root point was that, those who already owned these chips, don't really need to "compete". The FPGA would simply add to what their CPU(s) can already do. They don't have to *replace* the cpu.
There really isn't much of an I/O constraint, so it's just grinding on the nonce and testing for success. Most of the commercial SHA256 cores focus on I/O bandwidth, for the typical application of passing a lot of data into the hash.
So do you think that a coproccessor using local memory on a FPGA could go faster than the hardware on a VIA 7 due to I/O limitations?
This is something much different, with self-generated inputs and a test on the output of each cycle.
So.. How many rounds can you fit in a million gates?
I'm guessing at least four, maybe as many as 10. Harder to guess if one is using local memory, that stuff can be wicked fast on some things.
A modern GPU and some crafty OpenCL/CUDA code seems like a better avenue for research, rapid turnaround, and scalable speeds. You'd have both high clock speeds and parallelism at work.
Sure, for those who have a GPU and not a FPGA. Sure 55mhz doesn't seem like crap compared to 8 cores at 3 ghz, but a sha-256 setup in software can't process a hash in a single cycle, whereas a well made 'solid state machine' (which, as I understand it, what a FPGA program actually is) can process one hash in a single cycle, if the I/O isn't a limitation anymore. Multiply that by however many cores can be programmed onto a single chip, and there is serious potiental here. |
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Excuse me but you need to be more explicit. First does it need a "talented programmer" or is it "child's play"?
To a programmer talented enough to hack his GPU, hacking one or more parralel sha-256 coproccesors into one or more FPGA's would be child's play.
I understand you are excited about the possibilities but you are making grandiose claims without evidence, nor even concrete estimates of the performance you expect.
How bout some actual numbers? How many SHA256 hashes can you really do in parallel on your FPGA? Please state the actual model number of the FPGA you expect to use. What actual data rates are expected?
To be honest, I was over the top when I said that a set of four FPGA's would look like a supercomputer. I can't really say what can be expected, until I try it, but my own (admittely limited) experience with FPGA's is that a single such chip can replicate a pretty complex shortwave receiver, tuning and all, including all of the currently popular modes on shortwave with zero aid from the master cpu. Two are required only for the experimental modes, and they may even be better/faster these days, as it has been a number of years since I played with these things. They are certainly cheaper. At first glance at the complexity of the sha-256 algorithium, I would expect to be able to get at least four such coproccessors into a chip comparable to the kind that I have used in the past. Any one of which should have a kh/s rate somewhat less than the hardware found on a VIA 7, assuming that they are implimented in pretty much the same way. The 'virtualization' of the solid state circut within a FPGA does impose a slight (yet measurable) penalty, but I don't think that it would be so high as to really matter. If all four chips, each with four coproccessors, could be successfully coded and utilized; I would expect that the resulting kh/s rate would total at least 14 times what the single coproccessor on the VIA 7 can run. And that doesn't include the additional kh/s that the CPU or the GPU could add to the mix.
Beyond that is the price of the chips, the price of the developer environment and the power requirements. Any of these can be very significant barriers to this idea.
Peace.
Sure, but I was assuming that someone already has a set of these chips for experimental ham radio hobbies; in the same way that using GPU's to crunch numbers assumes that one already has the GPU. It doesn't make economic sense to buy these chips for this reason any more than it makes sense to buy extra graphics cards solely to generate bitcoins. Honestly, I don't know if this is the reason, and I can't know. But if someone has done this, it's another game changer for the bitcoin community. Anyway, I imagine that FPGA chips will eventually become a standard thing to have in a high end PC, and most OS's will be altered to take advantage of them on a regular basis. Can you imagine what a game company could do if one of these were in every PS3? |
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I think the most apt description of Bitcoins is that they are shares of stock in this communal Bitcoin enterprise we are undertaking.
I'd like to submit that I think the most apt description of bitcoin is that it is most like a Global Exchange Trading System (GETS) which is a variation on the LETS concept that isn't for hippies. Descriptively it differs because it's community is loosely knit and global rather than an intertwined small-town. As such, there can be no commonly trusted party to operate and monitor the system, so that function is trusted to redundancy and mathematics. (block list) LETS communities can rely on "local knowledge" of peoples historical behavior and intentions. As such it is perfectly reasonable for them to advance credit to people (negative balances) in certain situations. In a GETS community advanced knowledge of all parties and intentions is not practical or even preferred. As such, GETS operates on a zero credit policy. (no negative balances) Also, since GETS trade globally, there is no "national currency" that can be used for equivalence. As such, GETS defines it's own unit for accounting purposes. Since this currency must necessarily vary against some national currencies, the LETS strict "no interest" principle cannot be preserved. ---- I think if people understood LETS they would intuitively understand GETS. The rest of the bitcoin details are just one possible GETS monetary policy. Well done, indeed! I think that you have nailed it one the head. A Global Exchange Trading System. I think that you should write an expanded article along these lines, if you are willing, and post it both on the wiki and wherever else that you would like. So that we can establish early that Bitcoin is a 'trading system' and *not* a currency (hard or otherwise) and *not* a commodity or intended to be traded as such. Are you willing, Red? |
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You're safe if none of your addresses are used to receive coins from people who know who you are and you never send coins to people who know who you are. Good. Thank you. I was never intending to do either. I'm intending to use Bitcoin only where anonymity is one of the goals. I'm sort of the opposite. I don't really need or depend upon the anonymity aspect of Bitcoins, but the fact that it is there is something that I don't mind and can serve a useful purpose from time to time. There is value in Bitcoins for me even if anonymity were completely compromised, and would be fine with identity being merely difficult to trace rather than impossible. I also know that isn't necessarily the attitude of everybody, and on the whole if there is something that can improve the identity security of users of this software, I'm completely supportive of the idea. Put me mostly in the pragmatic camp here if it can be said. I suppose that I am in your pragmatic camp as well, as I do not really require the anonymity of bitcoins, yet I can also see the value to others (and therefore to myself). |
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$0.06 per BTC * 23,000,000 total potential shares = $1.38M market cap. Most shares are held by the "corporation" which is exchanging them for processing power over time.
This is just one way of looking at the coins. I contend that if some rich dude held 95% of all gold and he was selling gold for processing time at a fixed rate that it would not be considered monetary inflation any more than an individual with 1% of all gold in saving deciding to spend it. The fact that this "rich dude" is the the bitcoin algorithm does not change the fact that there are only 23,000,000 possible BTC.
Isn't the limit just shy of 21,000,000 possible BTC? |
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Please excuse my dumb question, but what OS is running on this? There are many people who could compile a static binary if we have that information.
As I mentioned, it's a hacked up version of GNU/Linux that Asus used on their older netbooks. |
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I've attempted to get the linux bitcoin client to run on my Asus 701 netbook, but it just complains about missing gblic libraries. Installing all of gblic on my Asus would not only take up too much of the flash storage, it seems like it would break a number of things. The version of linux on the 701 is a bit of a hack, as it is really an embedded device at heart that was intended for kids to play with. Is there any way someone might be willing to compile a staticly linked linux binary for me to try, or would this just be too large anyway?
If that isn't workable, is there a command prompt or Midnight Commander-like client forthcoming, or am I just too old?
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