Theoretically, we could reach a maximum difficulty. The hardest possible difficulty would mean to solve a block you need to find a hash that is ALL zeroes. Since hashes can be any number up to 2 to the power of 256, this would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to find using current methods. The only way we would ever reach this is if someone found a vastly superior method of finding hashes to the current brute force method. Such a person would probably keep their method to themselves and make a fortune off of Bitcoin

Thanks for the offer, but the release problem is solved - going forward I will make 7z releases as well as .exe releases with a Windows installer. My concern with your method is that unpacking every time can be slow (only have to unpack once normally) and it's better to install to a well-known location (like Program Files/poclbm) than a temp folder.

Hello everyone, I've made a GUI miner for poclbm and it works great with deepbit. If you don't like messing around with the command line and want a convenient miner, you should give it a try. Screenshot:



The thread for it and download link is here.

If you like it please consider a donation, I don't charge anything for my work because I want to see Bitcoin be successful, but donations would help convince my wife I'm not crazy for spending time on this

That's correct, you would see available devices in there and choose one. For example, on my PC I have:

The first one is my CPU and will be slow to generate coins with (only a few MHash). The second one is my GPU and the one I want to use in the app. Juniper is the code name for the Radeon HD 57xx series of cards such as my HD 5770.

Other common code names would be Cypress for HD 58xx and Hemlock for HD 59xx.

Hope this helped, if not you can try to explain further.

Hi, if you see something like "162 MHash" in the bottom right corner of the app, it means it's running correctly. Look at the screenshot in the first post to see it. If you don't see that in yours I can try to help further.

In the client, Generate Coins will generate coins using the CPU only. Since CPU is so slow and it will use 100% of your CPU, probably this is not worth doing.

This is probably a Windows-only bug. From the multiprocessing docs:


Since Windows lacks os.fork() it has a few extra restrictions:
Global variables

Bear in mind that if code run in a child process tries to access a global variable, then the value it sees (if any) may not be the same as the value in the parent process at the time that Process.start() was called.

If everyone else is running on Linux but I am running on Windows, this explains why it would work for others but not for me.

Thank you, but I did supply the argument. In fact the program will not start without the config file. My config file is the right format as well and has "host=127.0.0.1" in it.

I suspect that the program worked fine at one point and I have a more recent version with a bug in it.

Definitely not, I get about 900 KHash per core on poclbm and only 182 KHash per core on pure-python.

I'm trying to run this and getting an exception:


It seems that the settings dictionary is empty, because when we're using separate processes the children don't have access to the parent's variables. Probably the settings should be passed in as constructor arguments. I might put this up on GitHub and hack on it a bit if you don't mind

A new version of the miner is available; I've updated the download link on the first post, or you can get it here:

    poclbm-gui-20110227.7z

Changes since the last version:

- The console window is hidden by default. It can be shown in its own tab using Help -> Show Console. Log messages are also redirected to 'guiminer.log' in the executable directory if you want to look at them after.

- Clicking "X" minimizes the miner to the system tray instead of closing it; this matches the behavior of the official Bitcoin client. You can quit the program by File -> Quit or right-clicking the tray icon and clicking "Close".

- Tooltips appear when you hover on the text entry fields.

- Tabs are hidden if only a single miner is open.


I will look into the .exe installer over the next week, future releases should have both installer and 7z packages.

Maybe a simple installer would be better than either 7zip or single file. Non-technical users are used to clicking through an installer and creating a shortcut on their Start Menu/Desktop, so doing the familiar thing might be best. With single file executables I've seen people delete the executable and think they are just deleting a shortcut

And maybe the installer will use 7zip internally, for the best of both worlds.


I do appreciate you bring up usability things. I think Bitcoin has a long way to go for usability in general before "normal" people are comfortable with it, so I'd like to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem

You can look here to see what different GPUs are capable of. Poclbm is slightly faster than the numbers in that chart, so 16 Mhash is right on target.

"Difficulty 1 hashes" are hashes that nearly solved the block, but weren't quite good enough. You can think of generating coins as a lottery where you buy tickets and you win if the number matches the winning number. Difficulty 1 hash means that your number was really close to the winning number, but you didn't win. It's just shown to give you an idea of how many tries your GPU has made, and so you can say "ohhh, I was only off by one number, maybe I'll win next time"

I appreciate any donations, so far I have made a whole... 2 BTC, haha.

I'm creating a GUI miner application that works towards this. Right now it only supports m0mchil's miner but I plan to support other miners soon.

I just released a GUI that tries to make GPU mining easier, maybe you would find it helpful? Here is the thread link:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3878.0

Give it a try and I can help you out if you get stuck.

Thank you slush for the comments! I'll try to post a new version sometime this weekend to address them.


Good idea, I forgot to do that


Agreed, terminal window is ugly and I should take it out. I left it for testing in case exceptions were thrown and people could report what happened, but probably it's better anyway to log exceptions to file or a tab. I think maybe py2exe already logs exceptions in some way, so I'll look into that.


The way I implemented it does require the poclbm.exe - I run it as a subprocess and attach to its standard output. In other words even though both are Python programs, they don't know about each other. This was done since I hope to also support puddinpop or other miners in the future in the same way (run their exe as a subprocess and interpret their output). Also, I didn't want to change too much from original poclbm because if I make too many changes, it becomes harder to pull updates from m0mchil into my fork.

Another idea I had was to separate the GUI out totally - then have a single EXE for the GUI and a separate single EXE for poclbm. Right now the GUI uses PyOpenCL just to check for available devices but in fact this information could be obtained from poclbm (just run it without any flags to see the output) and then the GUI only needs to depend on wx. What do you think?

The CPU mining in poclbm runs the same OpenCL code as runs on the GPU, so it will never be as efficient as something coded specifically for the CPU. But, if there is demand I could make it so that you can pick to use poclbm or RPCminer from within the same GUI. I would want to get permission from puddinpop but there's no reason this can't happen.

What's your setup? Performance should be identical to the regular poclbm - the GUI hardly consumes any resources. If you're noticing it to be significantly slower, it might be a bug.


I could hide the tabs and just show it as a single window when there is only one tab open - would that be better?

Thanks m0mchil, it wouldn't have been possible without your miner

Hey everyone, I've created a Windows GUI for mining Bitcoins using your GPU or CPU.

This is the easiest way to get started mining on Windows. No messing around with the command line is required, and it has several features beyond what command line miners provide. The GUI is free and open source, but if you successfully use this program to generate coins, I would appreciate a donation, no matter how small.

How to Donate:

Please send donations directly to: 1MDDh2h4cAZDafgc94mr9q95dhRYcJbNQo

Most donations I receive are less than 0.1 BTC, so please consider donating even small amounts if this program helped you out.

Features:
- Comes already configured for many popular pools. No need to enter in URLs and ports manually unless you want to. Can automatically fall back from a primary pool to a backup pool.

- Real-time statistics on all your running miners in one location. Displays hash rate, total shares accepted/invalid, and total shares in the past hour.

- Automatically start one or more miners on program startup.

- View your account balance with a pool and/or withdraw funds from within the GUI, at participating pools.

- Minimizes to tray. The tray icon can be hovered to show statistics, and miners can be paused from the tray context menu.

Screenshots:


Download latest version (Windows):
    
    guiminer-20121203.exe (self-extracting archive)        

Older versions:

    guiminer-20121118.exe (self-extracting archive)    
    guiminer-20120219.exe (self-extracting archive)
    guiminer-20110824.exe
    guiminer-20110701.exe (self-extracting archive)
    Archived versions

Running on Linux:

Support for this is still early but some people have reported success. To install it on Linux:

- Get the source code from GitHub either using Git or by downloading one of the archived source versions.
- Install OpenCL drivers and PyOpenCL. These are the same ones you need to run poclbm so if you search on the forums you can find guides for this.
- Install wxPython; your distribution's package manager should have this.
- Run guiminer.py to start the miner. This will let you mine using OpenCL/poclbm (the default mode). You'll have to compile the other backends separately if you want to use them.

If you do get it running, send me a message and let me know of your experience. I might make a separate topic about it if people are having trouble.

How to use:

Extract the archive to anywhere (your desktop is fine) and double click the guiminer executable. If you have OpenCL set up correctly this should launch the GUI. If you get an error about OpenCL, you need to install an OpenCL package from your GPU vendor. For AMD/ATI cards you can get OpenCL here.

Once the GUI is running, choose a pool and register if necessary from the pool website, then press "Start mining" to begin. Wait for the coins to come in and don't forget to donate

How to use a backup pool aka fallback support:

Fallback support is in the OpenCL miner only. In the flags, specify the info of the backup pool or pools. For example if I want to fallback to my account on slush's pool, I would write:

Kiv.GPU:mypass@api.bitcoin.cz:8332

If you don't know the host name or port, you can see it in the console tab whenever you run a miner.That's all you need for basic support. You can tweak it with these options:

--failback=N   attempt to fail back to the primary pool every n getworks, default 2
--tolerance=N   use fallback pool only after N consecutive connection errors, default 2

In the future this might be more tightly integrated into the GUI but I don't want to make the GUI too complicated for things that a lot of users don't need.

How to get help:

For technical support please post in this thread rather than sending me a PM; this will get you a reply sooner since other people than me can help you out. More information is better; with only a brief vague report we probably don't know enough to pinpoint your problem. Here's an example of a good report:

"When I try to start mining, I get "Problems communicating with bitcoin RPC" in the status bar and the miner doesn't start. I already checked that my bitcoin.conf contains the correct username and password. I am using:

GUIMiner version: v2011-06-09
Operating system: Windows XP SP3
Miner backend: OpenCL/poclbm
Video card: ATI 5770
Server: solo mining on Bitcoin client 0.3.22

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

Q: My window is invisible! What can I do?
A: See here for a solution.

Q: Help! The program crashed or didn't work!
A: If you post a bug report in this thread a variety of helpful people including myself can try to fix your issue. We need to know at least the following: what version of Windows you're using, what graphics card you're using, what version of drivers you're using, what pool you're using if applicable, and a detailed description of what went wrong.

Q: I get an error about "This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem." or an error mentioning "side-by-side". What can I do?
A: You may need to install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package. Nearly all Windows computers already have this installed, but a freshly formatted computer might not.

Q: I'm having trouble solo mining using the 0.3.22 Bitcoin client. Why?
A: This is a known issue, see this thread for more info. Reverting to 0.3.21 or earlier seems to fix the problem.

Q: How do I know if my graphics card (GPU) supports OpenCL or CUDA?
A: Try running GPU Caps Viewer. It will tell you what your GPU supports.

Q: How do I use the Phoenix/phatk miner?
A: See this thread for support.

Q: What extra flags do I use?
A: If you have a Radeon 5xxx card (for example 5770, 5890), use '-v -w128'. On CPU you don't need any flags. For other cards ask around.

Q: My temperatures are too high, can I throttle the GPU so it runs slower but cooler?
A: If you are mining using OpenCL you can use the -s flag a value such as 0.01 in order to force the GPU to sleep for 0.01 seconds in between runs. Increase or decrease this value until you have the desired GPU utilization.

Q: Can I connect to more than one pool with the same GPU? For example have a main pool, and a backup pool in case the main one goes down?
A: Yes, you can use the -f flag for this. A value of -f60 or higher in the backup pool's miner will cause it to yield most of the GPU power to miners with a lower f value (default is 30).

Q: Is it normal that GUIMiner uses a lot of CPU when mining on the GPU?
A: No, for most people GUIMiner uses less than 1% of CPU. This is a poclbm issue some people are experiencing - see this post for more info.

Q: Do I need the official Bitcoin client to be open while mining?
A: Only if you are doing solo mining - in this case you are connecting to the client instead of a pool server.

Q: Is there a tutorial for solo mining?
A: Yes, see this thread.

Q: How does performance using the GUI compare to using the command line?
A: They should be identical; the GUI introduces virtually no overhead.

Q: How do I know if I'm getting a good hashing rate for my card?
A: See this topic for a comparison of various cards.

Q: How do I know how many Bitcoins I'll generate with my card?
A: See Bitcoin Mining Calculator to determine this.

Q: I installed OpenCL, but my GPU isn't showing up. Only my CPU is shown. What is the problem?
A: A couple people experienced this issue and were able to resolve it by installing a different driver version. Another person resolved it on Windows XP by upgrading from Service Pack 2 to Service Pack 3.

Q: How can I delete my miner settings, or edit them manually?
A: Miner settings are stored in %APPDATA%\Roaming\poclbm. For example, on Windows 7 this path translates to C:\Users\Kiv\AppData\Roaming\poclbm. The file poclbm.ini inside contains the settings in JSON format. There are also some settings in .ini files inside the miner directory, also in JSON format. No registry keys are used, so removing these .ini files completely erases your settings.

Q: How can I completely uninstall GUIMiner?
A: Remove the GUIMiner folder and the miner settings above, and that will completely remove GUIMiner.

Q: I want to see X feature in the miner. How can I have it?
A: I'm working on new features but I have a full time job and other things to do too - if you want to encourage me send donations to: 1MDDh2h4cAZDafgc94mr9q95dhRYcJbNQo

Q: What does it mean in the summary panel when the shares say something like 1000 (150) accepted?
A: That means 1000 shares total were accepted, including 150 in the last hour.

Changelog:
20121203
- Update poclbm with bugfix for issue #54

20121118
- Update poclbm to latest miner including Stratum support.
- Fix rejected/stale counter not incrementing properly.
- For solo mining, accept bitcoin-qt.exe or any other *.exe file for client instead of just bitcoin.exe.
- For solo mining, add option to set bitcoin data directory, in case it's not in the default location.
- Remove Phoenix 1 support since it's no longer maintained.

20120219
- Include latest poclbm code with critical bugfix.
- Various updates to translations, pools, etc. from various contributors - see GitHub commit list for a complete list. Thanks to all who submitted patches!
20110824
- Fix accepted shares not being recognized under the newest poclbm version
- Fix balance not being recognized for slush's pool
20110823
- Update poclbm (OpenCL miner) to the latest version. This changes the format of a backup pool. In the "extra flags" you just enter your backup (or backups) like this: Kiv.GPU:mypass@api2.bitcoin.cz:8332
- Update Phoenix to the latest version. See their thread for details on changes.
- Remove ufasoft miner from the GUIMiner bundle. It's still supported, but you'll have to download it separately. I apologize for the inconvenience to ufasoft miner users, but I decided to do this since only a few percent of users were using ufasoft and due to recurring false positive issues from antivirus programs.
- Added "duplicate miner" option when right clicking on a miner tab. This is to make it easier to clone miners to multiple GPUs.
- Limited maximum scrollback in the console window to 5000 lines. On machines with low RAM, this will prevent running out of memory after a long period of continuous operation.
- Add more pools to the server list, though balance update doesn't work for all of them. I'm looking at ways to handle the large number of pools that are popping up better.
- Fix Linux bug where the window could not be restored after minimizing.
20110701:
- Updated poclbm (OpenCL miner) backend to the latest version which has built-in fallback support and slightly
improved performance using a modified phatk kernel. Big thanks to m0mchil and all who submitted code for this. This version should be a few percent faster on most graphics cards.
- Update Phoenix backend to version 1.50.
- Add many more pools to the server list, including separate servers for BTC Guild.
- Default CPU affinity changed to be CPU 0 only instead of all CPUs.
- Display of GHash shows more decimal places (requested by hawks5999).
- When you save miner settings it remembers the GUI size and position for future runs (requested by goozman96).
- Removed weird characters in console log of Phoenix miner.
- Error handling: If settings file could not be read, recover gracefully instead of raising a JSON error.
- Error handling: If no OpenCL devices exist, recover gracefully instead of raising AssertionError.

20110614:
- Slush's pool moved from mining.bitcoin.cz to api.bitcoin.cz. If any miners on slush's pool cannot connect, you should delete and re-create the worker to make sure it's using the new address.
- Add CPU affinity support, meaning miners can be assigned to a specific CPU core. Users seeing the 100% CPU usage when mining with OpenCL due to buggy drivers can reduce their CPU usage by allowing the miner to only run on a specific core.
- Fix error about missing logo.ico.
- New Italian translation, big thanks to MasterHunterHD for contributing this.
20110609:
- Fix bug where Deepbit API was disabled.
- Update BTC Guild url to contain www.
- Added "minimize to tray" option.
- Added separate menu options to create different miner types (Phoenix, puddinpop, ufasoft).
- Added Donation menu.
20110608:
- Support Phoenix miner backend and phatk kernel, which is slightly faster than poclbm on some graphics cards. Thanks to all who donated for this. Please bring discussion specific to the Phoenix backend to this thread.
- Support ufasoft CPU miner backend. Thanks to thebaba for contributing code for this.
- Add Chinese language translation. Thanks to Dean Lee for contributing this.
- Add German language translation. Thanks to Liikaa for contributing this.
- Add French language translation. Thanks to Cramoisan Florian for contributing this.
- Add Hungarian language translation. Thanks to Underyx for contributing this.
- Support multiple OpenCL platforms in the device dropdown (previously you had to use the --platform flag).
- Deepbit server location updated to pit.deepbit.net.
20110521:
 - Add BTC Guild mining pool to the list of presets.
 - Add -s flag to poclbm that can reduce temperatures by forcing the GPU to sleep. Use a value such as -s0.01 to sleep for 0.01 seconds between hashes (this would result in about 50% GPU usage, tweak the value to suit). Thanks to llanwj for coding this.
 - Add Spanish language support. Thanks to BitcoinsWallet for contributing this.
 - Add checkbox to disable warning about OpenCL not being installed.
 - Reset count of shares accepted/stale on change of server.
 - If balance API token is rejected by the server, prompt user to enter a new token.
 - Fix issue where the About dialog would be cut off.
 - Console logs now include a timestamp on all messages.
20110501: Improved Russian language support. No other code changes.
20110428: Added BFI_INT optimization.
20110403: Added support for puddinpop miners.

This is really cool It'll definitely help me understand better how the mining works.