Depends on your OS. As given in the OP:

Windows 64-bit blockchain (place in %AppData%/bitmonero, updated May 16)
Linux / OSX 64-bit blockchain (place in ~/.bitmonero, updated May 16)

That doesn't make sense when you can see your own hashrate go up.

My guess - some miners out there with large farms or cloud computing instances already optimized their miner (these are naturally the types who would know how to optimize). Up until now they dedicated a large number of CPUs to it. With 5x the MRO mined for the same electricity, their return was great. When an optimized miner was released, they reduced the number of CPUs dedicated to MRO (or just stopped mining altogether). Thus we see a roughly constant or maybe even decreasing hashrate as these two opposing trends cancel.

It should also be noted that the network hashrate was ~300 kH/s before we said an optimized miner was coming. That shot up to 700 kH/s within 24 hours (when the miner still was being tested and wasn't released). This suggests they wanted to gather more MRO (for hoarding or dumping) before they were back on equal footing with everyone else.

This is why we bother with optimization at all. After all, if everyone's hashrate goes up proportionally, no one is gaining any more coins than they used to. But we need to optimize to prevent unfairness from private optimizations. This is no different from what Bitcoin went through and still goes through on a monthly basis (because of constantly improving ASICs, which a few people have access to before anyone else). As for why this code is so unoptimized in the first place, you can go ask the Bytecoin developers. It may have been deliberate. It may not have been. I don't know. Just be glad we have Noodle.

Bottom line is that our network still only corresponds to ~7,000 modern quad-core CPUs. Believe me, that's not a lot. There are plenty of people who could easily whip up that many CPUs by themselves and do so legally (or at least discreetly). An easy example is server admins who could dedicate unused clock cycles to mining. Save the conspiracy theories for when we're at over 100,000 CPUs.

What operating system is this?

The uploader of that blockchain didn't specify the OS or 32-bit v. 64-bit so I'm not sure what it corresponds to. These are not cross-compatible. Download the blockchain that you need from the main post. Don't worry about the VLC thing, keep the name "blockchain" and the file type ".bin" just as you downloaded it.

I like it. A much stronger 'M'. I prefer the top left:

1. The 'folded strip' effect is lost in the bottom versions.
2. A deeper 'V' in the middle looks better.
3. As do vertical sides.

But I am not a fan of grey. A touch of color? Navy blue-like colors are also dark and regal:

Back up the .keys file (the file name depends on your wallet's name but usually something like wallet.bin.keys). You can also back up wallet.bin if you want, but that's really just sync data.



Just an oversight. The uploaded binaries correspond to the latest source changes but the version number was decided after compiling them.

Yes, it's updated. Those are the Google Drive mirrors I was referring to. You should restrict usage of them because Google will shut it down if it sees high traffic (i.e. don't tell your pool to go download from them).

There are Google Drive mirrors for all of these linked in the OP. They should not be used unless mega.co.nz doesn't work for you (due to bandwidth limitations).

New source (0.8.8.1) is up with optimizations in the hashing. Hashrate should go up ~4x or so, but may have CPU architecture dependence. Windows binaries are up as well for both 64-bit and 32-bit.

The trouble with a vote on this forum is that it's very easily stuffed (with puppet accounts). I think we'll have a discussion on the monero IRC channel and if a clear winner doesn't emerge, a roll call-type vote can be held. Quality of votes over quantity of votes.

I agree that there isn't much direction given by this contest, but that's because we didn't really know what we want. Unlike most projects, this one is sort of community-run rather than centralized so there's lots of different opinions to take into account.

Ah, ok. Thanks.

Only about 24000 coins are produced by the network each day so 11400 coins already mined by one pool doesn't make sense to me. Can you elaborate? What is this pool's true hashrate? (The pool website only says 60 H/s right now.)

Did you put <1> or 1? It should just be 1 (or 0, 2, 3, ...).

This?: http://moneropool.org/

It works fine for me.

Pool
 Hash Rate: 2.27 KH/sec
 Block Found: Never
 Round Hashes: 81574063
 Connected Miners: 47
 Mining Fee: 0%

The perception of "costly" is very different for you and me vs. a large entity (a company or a government). If they want to game it, they can and will. Altcoin markets are so tiny in the grand scheme of things that even rich individuals can game it. Another thing to note is that the vast majority of masternodes are in various VPS services (http://drk.poolhash.org/darksend.html). Amazon by itself is over 40% of all masternodes and another called OVH is about 25%. We already know tech companies give data to governments without notifying us. So even an honest individual might be running a masternode keeping logs.

Also, promising ring signatures is very different from delivering it. Darkcoin developers aren't professional cryptographers. Copy-pasting CryptoNote code into the BTC code and trying to fix it is probably a hopeless endeavor. If they ever did manage to get their own implementation, my concern is that the market will crash when several hundred thousand DRK locked up in masternodes enters the supply. Hopefully they'll find a way out of this (if they try to go down this path).

There's definitely scope for marketplace competition between multiple implementations in the privacy sphere. It would be pretty boring if everyone adopted ring signatures.

Oh, they seem to be two separate pools.

Pool owners,

Please PM me your URLs so I can start listing them in the OP. Just as a heads up, I will temporarily delist any pool that gets too big (>20% of the network).

So far I have:

http://moneropool.org/
http://extremepool.org/
http://monerominers.com/pool

Noodle is doing some final tests on Windows and will begin testing on Linux. He expects hashrate should increase across all architectures. I can confirm a 5x increase on an i7 quad-core + Windows 7 64-bit.

Please be patient. These are actual changes to the program, not just a switch that gets flicked on. It needs testing.

Bittrex is considering adding BCN (https://twitter.com/BittrexExchange/status/466682497544122368). Contact them about adding Monero. The more people that contact, the better.

Average CPU is actually about 20 H/s. It was 10 H/s before the recent optimization in slow_hash.c. That puts it at ~6000 CPUs (which corresponds to probably less than 2000 miners)

Difficulty was ~50-100k from July 2012 - January 2014, so 80% of the coins are not distributed among a "5-digit number" user base. More like 100 (simple math of diff to hashrate to number of PCs).

This just got meta.

Anyway, perpetual CPU mining is the CryptoNote developers' vision, but none of the devs on Monero feel strongly about it as far as I know -- meaning this coin will not hard fork to actively avoid optimized mining. My guess is it will follow the natural evolution that BTC and LTC laid out before, although the GPU/CPU or ASIC/GPU performance ratio might be substantially worse.