The official thread has been locked for quite a while, so not sure where else to bring this up. I wrote up a post on reddit about my concerns:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Unobtanium/comments/2281i0/under_attack/

and will quote it here:

I've noticed the DOA rate skyrockets on my p2pool node every 3 hours, for a while now. I tried to figure out why, and it's because the diff will drop impossibly low (like 25K) and then so many blocks flood in all at once my miners can't keep up, so the huge # of DOAs happen until all those new blocks are finished flooding in.

Looking at the block explorer this feels exactly like the old timewarp attacks on TRC's difficulty algorithm. An attack would manipulate the timestamps in such a way to get the diff really low, mine a massive number of blocks, then introduce it into the block chain causing an ophan and hundreds (thousands) of new blocks all generating coins only to himself and with no transactions.

That seems to be exactly what is happening now. Since the BTC thread has been locked for a while I can't bring this up there, so I'll mention it here instead, in the hopes the devs will notice and do something about it. The TRC dev tried a few things to try and counter it but eventually had to give up and revert to BTC's basic algorithm to make the timewarp exploits go away.

Uno may need to consider the same, or something like KGW if KGW has no known attack vectors yet.

http://www.businessinsider.com/report-mtgox-subpoenaed-by-us-prosecutor-2014-2

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=31258292

Terracoin build 0.1.3-46 is now available for download at our sourceforge
mirror and github repository.

This build will be mandatory at block 185056 (7 to 10 days from now).

This build includes a rewritten difficulty adjustment algorithm, returning
to a common targeting window.
Retargeting will occur at 180 blocks intervals (6 hours) based on the data
from the last 2160 blocks (3 days).

This should remove the difficulty swings we're currently experiencing and
bring more stability to the currency. This update should be the last of our
recent serie about difficulty adjustments.

A few known pool and exchange operators were included into this email
recipients, feel free to forward this email to other services not included
in this list (btc-e, vircurex, coinotron).

Known pool and exchange operators will receive a separate email in a few
minutes about the expected impact on their platform.


Download links:

source: master branch at https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin

windows binaries:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/terracoin/files/latest/download

Source-based update:
If you previously cloned our repository, you may update using:

cd /path/to/your/local/clone/
git checkout master # locally on the master branch locally
git pull --tags origin master # fetches and merges remote master branch

# headless daemon:
cd src
nice make -f makefile.unix -j 4
strip terracoind

# qt-client:
cd /path/to/your/local/clone/
qmake USE_IPV6=-
nice make -j 4
strip terracoin-qt


regards,
---
TRC

Does anyone know if Cryptsy supports deposit of coins in generated blocks? That is, using a Cryptsy deposit address while solo mining or a direct payment pool like P2Pool (pays in the coinbase of the block, not afterwards via normal payment).

I wouldn't want to set up solo mining for a variety of alt coins, but if I could deposit directly to Crypsy then I could just mine at pools and send the coins there directly for sale without bothering with a local wallet/install for each coin.

Thanks!

The new version kicks in, in just a few thousand blocks. Please upgrade asap. From:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=51F25CCE.6060309%40gmail.com&forum_name=terracoin-announce

Terracoin update 0.1.3-42 is now available for download at our
sourceforge mirror and github repository.

This build addresses the difficulty manipulation issue currently seen on
the live chain, and will be mandatory on block 175000.

The code allowing such difficulty manipulations was added to the client
prior to the ema difficulty adjustment implementation, it should have
been removed from the client long ago to prevent this.

Once most network nodes are updated, and block 175000 is reached, the
capped ema implementation should take care of abnormally forged blocks ;
as usual, this is supposing the network gets more hashing power than the
attacker(s).

With the current artificially decreased difficulty, and the network
hashing power way higher than the 'awaited' rate, network will generate
a lot of orphan blocks until this issue is addressed.

Download links:
---------------

source: master branch at https://github.com/terracoin/terracoin

windows binaries:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/terracoin/files/SatoshiClone/terracoin-0.1.3-42-win32.zip/download

Source-based update:
--------------------
If you previously cloned our repository, you may update using:

cd /path/to/your/local/clone/
git checkout master  # locally on the master branch locally
git pull origin master  # fetches and merges remote master branch

# headless daemon:
cd src
nice make -f makefile.unix -j 4
strip terracoind

# qt-client:
cd /path/to/your/local/clone/
qmake USE_IPV6=-
nice make -j 4
strip terracoin-qt

--
TRC.

I don't know much about encryption but I recall some older forms had security issues if you had messages that were too short. (Shorter than the key length? Not sure.) Is there any similar issues with signing messages with bitcoin? If I ask someone to sign a single word for instance, just 4-10 characters long, is that any sort of a security issue?

Thanks.

[Edit: I now provide some public p2pool nodes as well. I've tried to optimize them as well as I can, and I'm also actively trying to make improvements to my interface and I've submitted a few pull requests to various p2pool repos. Any suggestions/requests on what info you'd like to see on the interfaces is appreciated.]

Edit: All pools/etc are closed. Was a fun hobby for a long time but got too expensive.

Edit: I now provide some public p2pool nodes as well. I've tried to optimize them as well as I can, and I'm also actively trying to make improvements to my interface and I've submitted a few pull requests to various p2pool repos. Any suggestions/requests on what info you'd like to see on the interfaces is appreciated.

Hello everyone. Been working on a pool, with TRC as the first coin available in it.

www.royalminingco.com

Set username to the address you want payments sent to. Password can be anything for now.
Add _X as a suffix to the username to set your difficulty between 1 and 65536. Default difficulty is 2.

For example, if you have a large GPU farm or an ASIC please go with something like:

cgminer -o stratum+tcp://trc.royalminingco.com:3333/ -u YourHashHere_32 -p x

Some features are:

• Stratum Only
• Transaction fees paid to miners
• DGM payment method, 2% fee
• No account needed, web site usage optional
• User controlled difficulty
• All payments automatic
• Payouts in discovered block coinbase: the pool never holds your coins

I have a lot of things I'd like to add to the pool moving forward, all suggestions are welcome. The front end is custom from scratch, so I can add features or adjust things however users like. Shares are not reported as "accept" unless they are successfully queued for the score database. If you see a share accepted, it will count towards your score. I need to pretty things up more, but the basic information needed is there.

DGM settings are f=0, c=.02, o=.98. This means the pool's fee is 2%. The pool absorbs some of the variance for you by setting c (variable fee) to 2% instead of f (fixed fee) to 2%. In shorter rounds the pool will make more than 2% and in longer rounds it will make less than 2% (down to almost nothing). Over a long period of time, the total will average to 2%. This way your income will very a bit less based on the length of a round. If this becomes too confusing or people are concerned the pool is not acting honestly in regards to the math, I could change it to a fixed fee. The variable fee is for the miner's benefit, not mine. Minimum payment is .0001. Anything below that will just be kept by the pool.

"Slightly stale" shares are given full credit.

DO NOT SET PAYMENT ADDRESS TO AN EXCHANGE ACCOUNT.
MOST EXCHANGES WILL NOT SEE YOUR DEPOSITS FROM OUR POOL.
DON'T TRY IT.

Happy mining.

Do programs like Electrum or Armory work with alt coins? I'd like to move to something lighter weight than running full block coins on my PC for every coin I have an interest in. (LTC, PPC, TRC, FRC at the moment.)

Thanks.

It seemed to me from the description that getdifficulty should be telling me the "current" difficulty, in the sense of the block we are working on right now. However it seems to actually return the difficulty of the most recent block on the block chain. getinfo does the same thing. However, cgminer has the correct difficulty of the block we are working on right now. Once this block is found, that's the difficulty in the chain.

Is there a way to get the difficulty out of the *coind for the block being worked on at this moment? I'm messing with TRC which has difficulty change every coin, which is why I noticed.

Is the only option to take the 'target' field from getblocktemplate and convert that to a difficulty number manually? That just occurred to me.

Thanks.

I'm wondering if the effort/cost to distribute additional nodes for a pool is really worth it, with stratum support in all of the major mining programs. It allows for local work generation, so the latency to/from the pool itself shouldn't impact your hashing speed much, if at all?

And if that's the case, does having globally diverse nodes for your pool make any difference? I'm working on a pool and was intending to have a few locations in other parts of the world to reduce latency for people in those areas, but given the way stratum works I'm not sure if there is any benefit at all to that now.

Thanks.

There are trading platforms that could be purchased and used for bitcoin exchanges which maybe some reasonable reliability and various tools, stand alone trading clients (or metatrader compatible), etc. However I can't see ever participating (in making such an exchange) because at what point does bitcoin (and maybe other alt coins) get recognized by various governments as legal currency? If that happens, then aren't exchanges immediately under the authority of your country's version of the SEC (for USA residents)?

I mean, you can't just go open your own currency exchange or forex trading business without some sort of various oversight, licensing, etc? There are all sorts of government regulations and agencies above forex sites like Oanda, for instance. And if bitcoin really is a currency, then how is setting up an exchange any different?

I've searched the threads I can find but it seems just a given in these methods that on a short round, if there is no backlog to pay, the pool keeps the extra shares and uses them to pay out later when a long round eventually pops up. I'm wondering why that is. If you have a short round, and there's no backlog, why not pay out the extra coins to the current shareholders? That seems more intuitive to me. Miners working right now might not be mining down the road, so I'm not sure why they should be reducing someone else's future payment delay during a long block? It makes sense perhaps if you had a static group of miners and wanted to reduce variance of your ongoing income stream. But miners come and go...

Curious as to anyone's thoughts on this.

I'd like to hammer my pool's backend with some traffic to see what sort of load it puts on the server. It isn't ready to go live yet, I still need to make a nice front end and get the payment system operational. On the chance you get a block accepted I'll send all the coins over to you. (You can, at least, see a list of blocks you found atm.)

If you have an ASIC or a pile of GPUs and don't mind farming TRC for a couple minutes so I can see what happens, drop me a PM. Thanks!

Don't know who protonevil is, but I appreciate his 36278.2 MH/s over on Coinotron. Block 100629 has been found and Terracoin client is back in sync.

In a pool with variable difficulty you can set, and PPS paying on each share, is it the difficulty of the share you submit that factors into the earnings you get or just the difficulty you were set at?

For instance, running cgminer you might see a lot of "1/1" giving the pool what it is asking for. If I set difficulty to 2, then I see "2/2" and get twice the payout as a "1/1" (at least how BitParking does it). However what happens when the block I have accepted is "30/2"? Do you get the normal payout for a 2 difficulty block, or do you get 15 times that for delivering a block that was 15x higher difficulty?

What prompted my curiosity earlier was seeing a 47.5K/1 block get accepted earlier while mining PPCoins.

Thanks!

I can' t add this to tacotime's build thread, but Compusa after rebate has this Sapphire 7950 for about $70 cheaper than the one listed in the thread.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7542562&CatId=7387

Good mining, all!