So I just clicked on this link: https://glbse.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=24

glbse.com has apparently been around for a few weeks/months now...

Why am I being warned about their potentially untrusted internet connection?

It costs literally $2 for a valid SSL certificate when you purchase a domain through namecheap (which is a very competitively priced domain name registrar).

Check out the "PositiveSSL Addon" for only $1.99 or something like that and be done with these "untrusted connection" warnings.

For proof, just click on the "bitcoin mining tutorial" link in my signature. Only cost me $2 for that https.

I guess my question is why are so many of you forgoing it? It REALLY throws up a red flag to anybody potentially thinking of investing money... although you (the developers) might be oblivious to this if you simply press "add exception" and keep on trucking.

[Then click here to go to http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinmining]

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Then click here to go to http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinmining and ask away!

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Does github have an rss feed or something of the latest stable bitcoin downloads?

I want to create some servers that run the latest bitcoin clients 24/7 and update them automatically whenever a new stable version is released.

From here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Denial_of_Service_.28DoS.29_attacks

Bitcoin has some denial-of-service prevention built-in (it will drop connections to peers that send it too much data too quickly), but is likely still vulnerable to more sophisticated denial-of-service attacks.

Does pushpool have any similar dos prevention techniques built in or is that up to the pool operator to take care of?

In writing this response, I managed to confuse myself pretty well.

Apparently this page states that:

Given just those fields, people would frequently generate the exact same sequence of hashes as each other and the fastest CPU would almost always win. However, it is (nearly) impossible for two people to have the same Merkle root because the first transaction in your block is a generation "sent" to one of your unique Bitcoin addresses. Since your block is different from everyone else's blocks, you are (nearly) guaranteed to produce different hashes. Every hash you calculate has the same chance of winning as every other hash calculated by the network.

Now when everybody is mining solo, that's just fine and dandy.

But when everybody is mining for say deepbit or slush, are the bitcoin addresses (and thus each merkle root) not exactly the same for every miner in the pool?

When Alice asks the pool for more work, mines the first nonce, and it doesn't hash out... she immediately moves onto nonce 2. But so does Bob. Was Bob's hashing of the second nonce redundant if Alice was mining for the same pool and asked for the work first?

[./bitcoind getwork]

When I enter ./bitcoind getwork (on testnet), I get this:

Code:

{
    "midstate" : "4a69151b7f5c43b23454a948a82f35b9ab98f5410a576d7af9665b8fcf6e7494",
    "data" : "000000013c29c465f47458e7a635cf9fc2ab2f40b228ec6f099ecfa100220d6c000000008c7bd504d767f50a70505561905f4c673dda265e1802508afdd29f3f674bac654e1f8dbd1c00824f00000000000000800000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000080020000",
    "hash1" : "00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000008000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000010000",
    "target" : "000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000004f820000000000"
}

What is that? (Yes, I have read this page!)

I mean... is that exactly what you would get from pushpool as well? Is that all a miner needs to solve a block? Miners take that data, add their timestamp, increment the nonce, hash and repeat? Only asking to "getwork" again once their nonce has overflowed or the target has been met? Is that correct?

So what pushpool does is getwork from bitcoind every second or so and then distributes that work to miners who ask for it and also have the correct mysql credentials?

I am thinking of writing a version of pushpool in node.js which is why I am asking.

Bonus Questions:

What format is "target" in? And what exactly is "hash1"?

Or would that be considered a collision of some sort? What exactly is a transaction id? A hash of some sort I presume?

I couldn't find much about transaction ids in particular on the wiki.

How would the bitcoin client treat two separate transactions with identical transaction ids?

When I enter listtransactions currently I can only see a bunch of validly generated blocks all containing roughly 50 BTC (testnet) in them but seem to have been unable to generate an "invalid" block so far, even after a few thousand found. Or I have any listtransactions isn't telling me?

Each of them roughly look like this:

Array
        (
            [account] =>
            [category] => generate
            [amount] => 50
            [confirmations] => 438
            [txid] => 9a5a99dd52d99716042a831077fee1a9db40349a1a2b08cf3ad39481eb1a9075
            [time] => 1309611969
        )

How can I tell if any one of those transactions were "invalid"?

I believe that in the bitcoin gui it will tell you if the 50 BTC you generated were invalid.

Deepbit pays for invalid blocks solved too apparantly, so there must be a way to check for them.

So when running a pool, you can determine what your block_hash is from your "solution" that pushpool provides.

How then would you use that block_hash?

I don't really want to rely on scraping and parsing blockexplorer.com to get the relevant information I need. (ie by concatenating the block hash onto http://blockexplorer.com/block/BLOCK_HASH_HERE )

When you are given the solution from pushpool. You have the timestamp, nonce, merkle root, and previous block hash to work with as well as the current block hash.

Any way to get a transaction id or specific block number or anything else from that? Or how would you determine whether the solution found was a valid one (and not stale/invalid to the network?)

I am in the process of writing some php code that will create the current block hash from a block's header.

I am able to find the previous block hash by reversing endianness on the 64 characters after the first 8 characters in the block's header.

Do I have to do the same with the next 64 characters of the merkle root? Recombine everything and then hash it twice with sha256 to determine the current block's hash?

I am starting from a pushpool "solution".

[NICE!]

On most github accounts it is free for the public to see. Like on the new android bitcoin client github account for example. (Thanks for leaving that open to the public barmstrong! 6,663 installs on the second day of release... NICE!)

Why are the all mighty coders privy to such information (I assume at least, I do not have a github account) when the miners, and other invested individuals could benefit greatly from such information as well?

Please Gavin, show the world this page: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/traffic

If https://github.com/barmstrong/bitcoin-android/graphs/traffic can do it then so can we!

All in favor say "Aye"!!!

I mean... when I attempt to validate an address and bitcoind is running testnet... both testnet and bitcoin addresses are valid addresses.

That is not true however, or rather it cannot be true, can it?

You cannot send bitcoins to a testnet address, can you?

Hello!

Please look over my bitcoin mining tutorial and leave a comment if you see any faults with it.

I want to make it as accurate as possible.

Obviously I will make it look a bit better, and it's not 100% finished (still a chapter or two to go).

But any suggestions, comments or criticisms you may have (however harsh!) I would highly appreciate.

Thank you for your time, and please (mods!) get me out of the Newbie section ASAP. Obviously I am not one