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I was just calling it doomsday as a joke. The reward halving from 50 to 25 BTC went just fine.
Reward halving is one of the best features of bitcoin, not a flaw at all.
Most alt coins are completely and utterly useless. Be careful.
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Like with the Bank of England once you have a huge pile of gold you can do stuff.
Central banks don't need gold or anything else to create money. When bank A wants to borrow 1 trillion pounds from the central bank, some banker at the central bank clicks the "OK" button with his mouse, and voila, 1 trillion pounds have been created. By the way, only part of a currency is made up out of thin air. The term is called leveraging. If a bank holds £100 in gold it's allowed to lend out £500 if the leveraging factor is set at 5. Govt's control the leveraging factor.
All the money is created out of thin air. But only some of it by the central bank. Most is created by the regular banks through the use of fractional reserve. Why do they keep going bankrupt if they have a license to create money out of thin air? Obviously some bankers are so incompetent they should be in an institution. A £5 note is worthless if there is no gold behind it for example.
Quoting Wikipedia: "At various times, the pound sterling was commodity money or bank notes backed by silver or gold, but it is currently fiat money, backed only by the economy in the areas where it is accepted." As long as there are people who will give you goods and services for British pounds, it has value. Same as Bitcoin. Gold may still affect the value of fiat currencies in the long run. Currently the Chinese are hoarding more and more gold. Meanwhile the Americans claim they have plenty of gold. But they keep it in a secret box and noone is allowed to look. Most likely this means most of their gold is gone (sold). Fort Knox is like Mt.Gox. The ledger claims there is lots of gold. But if you looked inside you'd be in for a shock. Does this mean the US Dollar will go down the toilet, and the Chinese Yuan will take over as world reserve currency? There's no sign of this so far - noone seems to care. |
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Yeah, that bit did confuse me. I don't get how new coins are created, unless it's built into the equation.
The rules allow each block to include one transaction that creates new coins out of thin air. The amount is 25 BTC. It used to be 50 BTC but it is reduced with every reward halving, which happens every 210 000 blocks. This is why finding a block is so valuable. The income from transaction fees is tiny compared to the new 25 BTC you are allowed to create if you get a block. New money has to come from somewhere. New US Dollars are created out of thin air (and sometimes small pieces of paper) by the Federal Reserve. And through fractional reserve banking. New bitcoins are created out of thin air (and electricity) by anyone who is mining. How long until the next reward halving (aka doomsday) ? http://bitcoinclock.com/ |
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Christhegoth, you need to read up on bitcoin and mining on the bitcoin wiki and bitcoin stack exchange. There's a lot of good information out there that can tell you exactly how things work. No need to guess. You can also ask here if there's anything you want to know. I'm happy to explain and so are many others. If you are unsure about something then just ask a question. Here are some links you may find interesting: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithmhttp://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/148/what-exactly-is-miningYou could also read the source code of several mining clients on github if you really want to get into the details. Are we getting our work from Satoshi?No. The Bitminter server puts together the data explained in the links above according to the bitcoin rules for a block. It generates a lot of different variations, and your mining client uses this data to generate even more variations of a block. For some of the data there is only one valid value at a given point in time. Some data is just random. And then there are all the transactions. If we mine a transaction you made then our work data was influenced by your transaction. Can you send a "magic" transaction that would instantly cause our pool to find a block? Read on... Can't we improve luck by changing the data we are hashing, if we have bad luck?We are changing the data. Billions of times per second. That's what mining is. Can we improve our luck by changing the block data we mine in a certain way?Only if you find a shortcut/weakness in SHA-256. There's a good explanation of the algorithm at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha-256 - see if you can find a weakness in it. Weakness meaning that you can with better than 50/50 chance determine whether a certain input will give a low hash without actually doing the calculations. Please, no superstition or hand waving. One person once told me that if the pool has bad luck I need to generate a new pool wallet to break out of the bad luck. While you can't break or weaken SHA-256 by saying random things that indicate severe mental problems, you CAN perhaps do it if you are able to untangle all those calculations involved and find a way to predict how a certain input will have certain effects on the output. Isn't future luck influenced by past luck or other past events?No. You are suffering from gambler's fallacy or something similar. Probability is hard for humans to understand, and misconceptions are extremely common. That's how Las Vegas was built. Wikipedia has a lot of interesting info on how your own mind can screw you over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biaseshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallaciesI'm not the only one to have asked what the point was. It can't just be 'building security'.
Yes, it can. But that's not a small thing. The way the blockchain solves the Byzantine Generals Problem is a breakthrough in computer science. This may be more important than Bitcoin itself. To understand how impossible it is to use bitcoin mining hardware to do something useful other than mining, read my answer to this question on the bitcoin stack exchange: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/7236/bitcoin-mining-asics-used-for-cryptographic-application-rainbow-tablesFrom the 'decryption' viewpoint we're crunching through all this math. What if we just decoded some terrorist stuff for The NSA without even knowing? Serious question.
No, that's not what we're doing. You can't even crack a simple password with a bitcoin miner (see above). Most likely we'll never know, but there you go. I guess some people are more curious than others.
We know exactly which data is being hashed. We know the exact algorithm we are using. And we know what the purpose is. We also know it is damn near impossible to use this for anything else (see above). If you are a little more curious you can just look all of this up. All of this information is right in front of you. It's not at all like we'll never know. |
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Why do you need SSH on your laptop?
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Organofcorti is awesome. Read his stuff.
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That 10 day bad patch, clearly shown on the graph, is a certain width. Compare it with other peaks & troughs & there is something there.
You're imagining things. It can look like there is a system or pattern when you look at a small set of data. In reality it's random. However, if it's only 10 days long ( for example ) then any pool-jumping will be pointless.
No, it doesn't matter how long. If you could pool-hop based on predicting luck then you'd make a lot more coins. But you can't. There's already many users struggling to understand random/luck. Some believe bad luck doesn't occur naturally and ask if the pool is broken every time we have bad luck. Don't make it worse by suggesting luck is predictable and follows a certain pattern. It doesn't. |
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Separate workers means you can see if one goes down, but if you use 1 worker it's still pretty obvious if 450 GH/s disappears.
Yeah, that's why I often tell people that using separate workers is most useful if you have them in separate locations. If something fails then you will know where to go to fix it. If you have 2-3 machines stacked on top of each other you'll probably do fine with 1 worker. If one of the machines fails it won't take you long to find out which one it is. We've just entered a period of what I expect to be 'bad times' that will probably last about 2 weeks. Then we should get 2 weeks of good times.
That's not how random works. If you think random events are predictable then go ahead and try to make extra coins by predicting which pool will be lucky. But please don't tell new users that this is how it works. |
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But Antminer does not appear in the network when i control it with my port scanner, not with DHCP-Server or with a static IP. I think this is the first problem.
If you set it up with a static IP that is not used by anything else on the network (make sure), you are still not able to reach its web interface if you put that IP in the address field of the browser? From the PC where you are trying to contact the Antminer, are you able to reach other machines on the network? |
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I'll also be adding an S3 to my mining kit later, which will be moved between these 2 pools to chase the luck ( it's the only machine that will pool-jump ).
Do you realize that chasing luck is pointless? You'll be leaving a pool after there was bad luck and you already got a low payout, and you'll be joining a pool after there was good luck and everyone else got high payouts. How do you plan to predict the future? Do you believe old luck causes the opposite luck in the future? Or that it causes more of the same luck? Both are popular superstitions. In the past you could sometimes tell if future payouts would be low on some pools, pools that used the proportional reward system. And also Slush's score-based reward system, which can probably be abused still if they didn't switch reward system. This resulted in something called pool hopping. People would switch pools at the right time and get more than their fair share of the mining rewards, while 24/7 miners got less than fair pay. PPLNS, which Bitminter uses, is designed specifically to make this impossible. It could be wise to give a reward to the block finder in addition to his payout.
It looks good on first glance, but this would just increase variance. Usually you get low payouts because someone else found the block, but sometimes you may find the block and get a high payout. Over a very long time it evens out, but in a shorter timespan it just creates variance. "Shorter" here means forever for small miners. That's not to say it wouldn't work. Many miners don't understand variance, and there's also the psychological aspect of saying "you get paid a bonus if you find a block!" but not mentioning that you get a lower payout the rest of the time. Worse is paying for stale work. It's a horrible idea. I think there are still some pools doing it, though. It just means that people with proper miners have to give some of their income to people with broken miners. If you have 1 TH/s and get 0.1% stales, and another user has 1 TH/s with 5% stales, you get the same payouts. Even though you contributed more to the mining effort. The other person was doing a lot of useless work, working on old data long after it was too late. So the effect is that some of your income is given to someone else. That's why you should not mine in such pools if your equipment is working properly. They are great if there is something wrong with your miners though, and they are producing a lot of stale work. Just like pool-hopping vulnerable reward systems, paying for stale work creates a pool where some users get more than their fair share, while others get less. On the other hand, if the pool says "we pay for stale work, so you don't lose anything - it can be an extra 1% income!" then it sounds like a great thing. What you don't realize is that in reality you may be making 1% less than your fair share because your hardware, software and internet connection are actually working. That's a lot of rambling. Anyway, that's why I don't add these two "features" that some pools have. I couldn't stomach marketing it as a good deal either. |
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Does every Antminer working unit need an extra name e.g. Biosman_Worker01, Biosman_Worker02 etc or is one name for all Antminer enough e.g. Biosman_Worker?
There doesn't appear to be any user named Biosman on Bitminter. I guess this was just an example you were using, but if not, make sure you use the correct user name - it's displayed in the upper right corner of the website when logged in. |
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There is Stratum protocol on port 443. This is the most efficient option. There are getwork and getblocktemplate protocols on port 80. Eventually I want to get completely rid of getwork, so please don't use it. Maybe you need to connect through a proxy at work? The adress: stratum+tcp://mint.bitminter.com:443 does not work at home nether in office
Some mining client interfaces don't like the stratum+tcp prefix. I can't remember if Antminer S1 is one of those. You could try with just: mint.bitminter.com:443 Does every Antminer working unit need an extra name e.g. Biosman_Worker01, Biosman_Worker02 etc or is one name for all Antminer enough e.g. Biosman_Worker?
That's up to you. You can run all your hardware on one worker. New users get a worker named "1" which is configured as a default worker. That means you can mine with just your user name and it will pick the default worker. On the other hand if you want separate stats and slow worker emails then it can be handy to create multiple workers, especially if you have machines on separate physical locations and one of them stop working. You can do this under "my account" -> "workers" in the website menu. What are these settings and do i have to change something? Default worker
Minimum difficulty
Work submits per minute Default Override:
Low hashrate warning Off Threshold: Mhps
Stratum extranonce2 Default Override: Bytes
Merged mining stale flush
There's a short tooltip text that appears if you hold the mouse pointer over the underlined words, that can help a bit. Ask if there's something specific you want to know about. Most of those settings will do fine with the defaults. The most useful thing is probably low hashrate warnings. You can choose a minimum MH/s there and if your worker goes below that you will receive an email alert. |
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Makes sense. But what about the case in which I'm brute forcing a private key. And my machine is the only one working on the problem. At some point in time a million bajillion years from now I would expect to have been able to try all possible combinations. Now assuming there is only one matching private key, it would be possible to find that key on the very last sequence tried. What is the CDF? Would 50% CDF be half that time, in this case?
Hmm, yeah ok, I was a bit quick there. You're hashing an 80 byte bitcoin header. Of that you'll just want to change the 4 byte nonce and the 32 byte merkle root (determined by the transactions you include). So that's 36 bytes, or 288 bits, you change while hashing. That's 2 to the power of 288 possible permutations, which is 4.9732323640978664E86. If we round it up a bit the number of possible headers you can hash is 5 followed by 86 zeroes. As a second passes you can update the time field and you get that many new headers to try. If you had a lot of hashing power I guess you could compute all those before everyone else, basically buying all the lottery tickets. It's also possible that at some point, with a certain previous block hash, difficulty, and time value, that there is no valid solution until the time field has advanced months or years. It's just not very likely. It's actually more likely that Slender Man lives under your bed. So check on that first. 50% CDF means 50% of blocks are found with this amount of work or less at the difficulty in question. At 99% CDF only 1% of blocks take more work, so that's pretty unlucky. On average it happens with 1 out of 100 blocks though, so it's not like some people think; "bad luck like this is impossible, something must be wrong". Mining is like a lottery and on average 1 out of 100 blocks will take that much work. If you expect that to never happen, it's your thinking that is wrong. |
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0 CDF would mean "it's impossible to find a block with this amount of work". That would be true only with 0 work done. Even with just 1 proof of work accepted by the pool there is a chance it will create a block, so that's not 0% CDF. If you found a block, then the round is not 0 CDF, per definition.
100% CDF would mean "with this amount of work you are absolutely certain to find a block". But that is never true. Unlike a lottery where you would perhaps be able to buy all the tickets, you can't do that in bitcoin.
As time approaches infinity, CDF approaches 100%. But just like time never reaches infinity, CDF can never be 100%.
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How do you get luck 47.47% ?
Over 9 days even luck would give us 14.6 blocks. During these specific 9 days we ended up finding 12 (+1 stale) blocks. That's bad luck, but calling it 47% seems a bit extreme.
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Maintenance went fine. Looks like everyone is mining again. Just give the live hashrate stats a moment to catch up.  4-leaf clovers work  Yes, rabbit's foot is also supposed to work. |
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Reminder: Short maintenance in 10 minutes. Expected mining downtime 1 to 5 minutes.
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Moving around trying to always be at the luckiest pool doesn't work. You can't move to a luckier pool when our luck is down, and back here when our luck is up.
Why?
Because you don't know how lucky a pool will be in the future. You don't know the future.
Crystal balls don't work. Tarot cards don't work. Voodoo doesn't work. Predicting today's luck based on yesterday's luck doesn't work. Nothing works. It's all superstition. The reality is that you can't tell the future.
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