Latest posts of: slush

Well, it is not "few kbytes saved versus save the network". I had quite long discussion with gmaxwell yesterday on -dev and I simply don't see any real attack vector which can be performed just because pool send merkle branch instead of transaction hashes (and this is REAL difference between Stratum and GBT). The only real attack vector which we found is that CIA will kill me, Tycho, Eleuthria, Graet, Inaba and some other pool operators, overtake our pools AND users won't notice anything and they'll keep on hashing invalid/broken blocks for CIA.

So from my view, GBT is wasting resources for no real gain.

More people reported issues with 2.8.2, hopefully ckolivas will find the problem soon. It still looks like the most stable solution is cgminer <2.8.0 + mining proxy. But we're getting closer to stable Stratum support in cgminer by every bugfix release!

api-stratum.bitcoin.cz:3333

but you can use standard host:port (api.bitcoin.cz:8332), cgminer will switch automatically.

Mining proxy version 1.1.0 has been released. I'll upload windows binaries later today, now I'm on Linux only.

New version has C extension module for speeding up midstate calculations, so it is helpful for big mining operations running getwork miners.

There's also --test parameter, which run performance self test for getworks.

Some numbers (my Intel Atom netbook):
Original sources: 10000 getworks generated in 26.482 sec, 377 gw/s
C extension: 10000 getworks generated in 3.481 sec, 2872 gw/s

Beagleboard XM (~equivalent of Raspberry Pi):
C extension: 10000 getworks generated in 12.270 sec, 814 gw/s

So proxy is now fast enough to run many THash/s mining operation with getwork miners on hardware worth less than 100$.

To compile midstate C extension, just type "make" in midstatec directory. Proxy will auto-detect the module on next run.

Edit: I forgot to mention that all github users have tu run "setup.py develop" or "setup.py install" every time they fetch new version!

cgminer 2.8.2 fixes critical bug in calculating share difficulty. It is really important upgrade for cgminer users!

ckolivas, reconnecting demo extended for "client.get_version" message (sent after subscribe) is here: http://pastebin.com/Ai2htr3R

Quote from: gmaxwell on October 10, 2012, 10:49:09 PM

As a long time user of Bitcoin and a developer: Thank you for taking a firm position against making dust payouts. Blockchain bloat is no one's friend, and tiny outputs will likely never get spent— meaning they'll bloat the txout set perpetually.

On the other hand, thanks to sites like Satoshi dice or Deepbit, bitcoin client get drastically improved in the area of tx processing and a lot of other major improvements are coming thanks to unbelievable effort of core developers. Although I'm not a fan of bloating blockchain, these things definitely help whole project move forward its prime time...

Ok, bug in cgminer is confirmed, we're working on the fix.
I also double checked the proxy and no related bug has been found.

dlasher, can you confirm that this bug happen also when proxy is NOT in the chain? I'd like to know if there's something broken in proxy.

Are all of these users using Stratum proxy in the chain?

~~Unfortunately my cgminer 2.8.1 freezed during pool restart few minutes ago. So there's still some problem...~~

I'm an idiot (again). It was fault in my code.

Quote from: beekeeper on October 10, 2012, 04:37:52 PM

Ofc, it can be done like that, but again, we are back at start, I have to overdesign chip controllers to cover extra bandwidth.

It is nice to see you agree that the only problem is sub-optimal software in miners.

a) Optimize wrongly designed mining software
or
b) Hard fork of whole bitcoin network?

I vote for b)

Btw it would be quite comfortable for me to agree with you. With bigger nonce range I won't need to switch to Stratum protocol, because getwork protocol would be good enough for ages. But still I decided that there's much easier solution than trying to do hard fork, so I just re-designed protocol. Btw it isn't easy, I'm working on it almost two months on full time.

Stop calling optimizations "work arounds" and let's go back to work.

Code:

 [2012-10-10 16:38:44] Stratum from pool 0 requested work restart
 [2012-10-10 16:38:44] Accepted 96dd686b Diff 1 BFL 0
 [2012-10-10 16:38:50] Accepted 45f658d1 Diff 1 BFL 0
 [2012-10-10 16:38:50] Accepted a2c9ffeb Diff 1 BFL 0
 [2012-10-10 16:38:55] Pool 0 http://192.168.3.9:3333 not responding!

~~It is already over 5 minutes and no reconnect so far :-(. It happen during pool restart (no client.reconnect() has been sent). Using latest git.~~

It was fault in my code, I'm sorry for the report. That happen when all pieces of used software are bleeding edge, one never know what exactly might be broken *right now*.

Quote from: dlasher on October 10, 2012, 03:20:18 AM

Interesting error thrown tonight, not sure what to make of it:

It is just an ugly error message about stale share. It doesn't break anything and I'll fix it in upcoming release.

Quote from: VeeMiner on October 10, 2012, 08:52:51 AM

14231 block - no reward?? I know for sure that all of my miners were running...

There were no issues for this block on the pool. Is reward calculated for you now? There's page cache on stats page...

It stucked on cross checks of block validity against blockexplorer/blockchain for some reason. Maintenance script then turn into manual mode and waited to my presence.

Pending rewards and payouts are now fixed and I'm watching closer to the fact why blockchain API request didn't timed out...

Slush is saying that it is mining *software* problem. Even with future ASIC miners it will be feasible to prepare block headers on decent computer. If there is any real problem, then it is just using obsolete protocols between computer and mining device.

I just updated it, thanks for poking me

ufasoft, any chance to implement Stratum protocol to the miner? cgminer 2.8.0 supports it, so there's already reference implementation in C. I see tons of ufasoft miners on my pool and native stratum support would be benefical for everybody.

Don't hesitate to join #stratum IRC channel and ask to anything, there are always people willing to help you.