I think it's quite easy; store all orders in an unindexed table in MySQL and run a badly written SQL query to find the next match. I've seen enough awful code to suspect sheer incompetence way before suspecting malice, aka Hanlon/Heinlein's Razor...

I've downloaded the list of all trades executed on Mtgox over the past 24 hours (there's an API URL for that), and wrote a tiny script to count the number of trades during every 1-minute interval.

Turns out, the single worst minute saw SIX trades per second. The top 15 worst 1-minute intervals saw an average of 3.8 trades per second.

Let's try to estimate how many trades per second their engine is capable of. The worst lag I saw over the past 24 hours was about 500 seconds, i.e. 8 minutes. Let's simplify this a lot, and assume that this lag was created after the worst 1-minute interval, when Mtgox saw 370 trades. In the most conservative scenario, a lag of 8 minutes would mean that these 370 trades took 7 minutes to execute (this is a bit of an approximation, but I think it's close enough).

That places the Mtgox trading engine speed at just 0.9 trades per second.

This is so ridiculous that I have to wonder if I made a mistake somewhere. But if I didn't, their trading engine was written by monkeys (something that everyone seems to agree on anyway).

EDIT: I've had someone question the approximation, so I wrote a better script. This one iterates 1 second at a time, queues the trades arriving in that second for execution, then executes trades from the queue at a specified speed (seconds per trade). It then measures the lag directly. Using this code, to get the worst lag of 500 seconds, "seconds per trade" is 0.65, i.e. approximately 1.5 trades per second. But I doubt 500 seconds was the worst lag during these 24 hours...

EDIT: if the worst lag during these trades was 50 minutes as suggested by 2weiX, that places the speed at pretty much exactly 1 trade per second. Hm... how suspicious... (might be an accident though)

I would have thought that if you are going to attach *any* BGA balls then it is far easier to attach them all, than to leave some unconnected. Unconnected pads on the PCB won't make any difference to the PCB price. While I haven't ever hand-soldered BGAs, having all pads is supposed to make it easier, rather than harder. For example, by pulling the part into proper alignment uniformly as the solder melts and wets the pads.

I managed to fit one SHA256 round, one hash per clock, into about 30k LUTs + 13k registers on a Cyclone, although I never validated this design because my FPGA only has 17k LUTs. So, if I didn't mess up (which I can't really tell...) this would mean 60k LUTs + some interfacing. I verified the core idea behind this in a non-FPGA simulation, and then implemented the idea in Verilog.

Unfortunately the larger dev boards are a bit too expensive for my taste, so this project is on halt. If anyone is willing to loan one to a complete stranger, I'm all up for it We could meet first. I live in East of England, pm me if you wish.

> "ну и что - пипл хавает"

Прям в точку, сразу узнаю bitcoinex'а с его отмазками

Кстати, у меня неск. другой контактик был, Denis Feklushkin <denis.feklushkin@gmail.com> - общались по поводу моего аккаунта.

This hasn't happened - 0.3.22 still wants 0.01 BTC, even though I already have a 0.001 BTC specified as the default fee. Is this still on the table?

Интересно, какое ключевое отличие "роста курса" от того, что мы наблюдаем сейчас? Хотя ладно, что тут париться - и так понятно, что всех дурят. С расчетом на тех, у кого соображалка вообще не работает, и кто прохавает такие отмазки и рискнет вернуться на btcex.


Если кто-нибудь врубился, какая тут связь, то растолкуйте пож, т.к. до меня не доходит. Какой долг? Кому выплачивать? Один долг, про который мы знаем - это ваш долг пользователям, в биткоинах. Он остается неизменным, не важно какой курс. Значит какой-то другой долг... (подсказка: никакой не другой долг, а просто все то же втиралово)

Конечно одинаковые, вы ведь ни разу на них не ответили. Если я ошибаюсь, покажите, где ответ на "какая связь между подьемом курса и возвратом денег". Разве удивительно, что вопрос, оставленный без ответа, повторяется?

Most people appear to have received a fifth of their BTC balance. A select few have received the whole lot. Those who have any balance seem to be able to withdraw without any difficulty. It does still seem rather shady - they really have no clue as to the importance of clear communication, do they... Or, if they do, they have no idea what "clear" means.

The latest statement is that the growing exchange rate will magically cause the rest of the BTC balances to appear, but there were no responses as to how exactly this works, or how high the rate needs to climb before this happens. Typical absence of any clarity whatsoever.

I think this point is quoted out of context. Deflation only discourages savings on fear of bank insolvency. It does encourage hoarding of money via other means. We don't have banks to collapse, so I think this point is completely the wrong way around - deflation encourages people to hoard BTC.

I'd gladly join a BTCv2/fork which does away with the total currency limit by removing the halving of rewards. I'm also rather convinced by Suggester's arguments in favour of tying BTC reward to network hashrate.

Ah cool, I was just confused because I don't know how I personally would send money back to someone who paid me

Also, this 1 year old post http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=73.0 confused me too.

I'm in then!

Found this today: http://www.bitlotto.com/

Looks fine, except for one thing. I thought it was impossible to figure out how to send money back to someone who sent you some, unless they also specify a return address.

However, BitLotto claims that all you have to do is send a payment, and if you win the money "will just show up in [your] account". Is this possible?

Unlucky? Surely this means you are rather lucky - you have found more blocks than the average person would. But the pool averages it out.

As for the 7-day average - it goes down as the difficulty goes up, due to more people crunching the numbers.

Drool...

By my own estimates, this thing could generate a block every few hours at the current difficulty. I doubt it would cost less than $25k-$50k though...

(source: http://www.dinigroup.com/new/products.html)

Great stuff, finally a pooled miner that's actually fast! Thank you slush!

Would be neat to see all the contributors included directly into the generated block, so that they see it as "Generated" and maturing in their own BitCoin client, immediately. Like some other pooled servers did. That was really nice of them.

Seems to work! Algo results on Q6600: c: 920, 4way: ~600, cryptopp: ~600, cryptopp_asm32: 1050. This is for a single thread.

I wish the way you logged information was compatible with file redirection. I run my miners in the background and redirect all output to a file. Most implementations log the data just fine, but yours outputs nothing.

For example:

   poclbm.exe --user=... --pass=... --host=...  >file

this outputs *nothing* in the console, but saves progress in "file". This is the expected behaviour for console programs.

   minerd.exe --algo cryptopp_asm32 --url [...] --userpass [...] >file

this prints progress info to the console, and creates an empty file.

(also, since I'm firing off requests... a zip package (no installer) would be most appreciated! )

Thanks for your effort!

---------

There's something dodgy with using multiple threads: one of the threads doesn't start, and the CPU usage is correspondingly below the expected amount. E.g. "starting 3 threads", but only 2 cores are used, only 2 threads report khash/sec, and only 2 threads are doing work according to ProcessExplorer.

Lastly, algorithm cryptopp_asm32 consistently generates proof of work that gets rejected with a "Boo" message.

The link is correct, yes. It worked after I installed this SDK and rebooted. As I said, I also wiped my old nvidia drivers, but I don't know if this step was absolutely required because I didn't test the intermediate stage. Apart from that, no other steps were required.

I'll post a comment once a block gets generated So far got nothing; there was a 50% chance of having generated something in the last couple of days.

(post rewritten)

Here's what I did to get it to work:

- Run GPU Caps Viewer to confirm that there is no OpenCL on my system at the moment.
- Use Driver Sweeper to kill my old nVIDIA drivers (no idea if it would have worked without this step)
- Install ATI Stream SDK 2.2
- Reboot
- Verify in GPU Caps Viewer that OpenCL 1.1 is now installed.

Importantly, ATI Stream SDK 2.1 / OpenCL 1.0 did not work, with a very similar error message. Thanks to m0mchil who helped me out over PM! Getting 150M hash on my HD5770, which is pretty cool if the number isn't lying. The OS remains perfectly responsive.

LobsterMan, if you could, please mention in your steps that Radeon owners should install SDK version no lower than 2.2.

Hi,

Followed the steps exactly as described there. Here's what I get when I try to run poclbm.exe:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "poclbm.py", line 5, in <module>
  File "pyopencl\__init__.pyc", line 3, in <module>
  File "pyopencl\_cl.pyc", line 12, in <module>
  File "pyopencl\_cl.pyc", line 10, in __load
ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found.

This was also mentioned in http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1334.280 (with no definitive fix offered). Since you invited feedback on this guide... here it is The steps must be somewhat incomplete.

I'm running Win7 64-bit and have an HD5770. I have the latest driver but no ATI Stream SDK (but then the guide didn't ask for it... do I need it?)