I would try this:

than look at the source of the page rendered.

print_r itself represent a string. You must echo it to print it.

If it appears that "bitcoin" is NULL or some error object, it may not be connecting. The info there you would get there may give you some insight.

You may also consider looking into:

The reason to separate enforcement and judgment has to do with the fact that whoever can be trusted with handling funds and with its honesty and general judgement may not have, themselves, the expertise for a specific case. You can see it as hiring experts or lawyers to make a case to a judge. The judge doesn't know about the topic, but will consider experts and witnesses to make a ruling.

The idea is to have a system that can also handle case that are outside the scope of what could have originally been anticipated.



In an ideal world, everyone is honest and collaboratively complete everything, and you get nothing while having nothing to do. However, if a conflict arise, you get paid whatever you charge for whatever it is that you are offering to do. I know that is still vague, and that is for the sake of flexibility.

The first thing I would use it for is to fund open-source software, namely contributing to adding features to existing wallets.

Essentially, I propose a feature, people who want to see that feature implemented commit funds to some multi-sig, I hire developers to do the work, the work gets completed, everyone is happy, the funds are released cooperatively, and you didn't do anything. However, if the work doesn't get done, people are not happy and ask for their money back, you get hired, you find out that the developer can't show a working product, then you return the funds to the original contributors.

By the way, a Charlie can also offer to pre-approve contracts for a fee.

How much would you charge for reading and pre-approving a contract? (can be a range, depending)

How much would you charge for spending up to an hour looking at a case and make a ruling? (Again, it can be more complicated than a number)

A ruling would be something like:

• The work has been fully completed and the funds should be released in full; or
• The work has been partially and the [such] percentage of the funds should be released; or
• The work has not been done and the funds should be returned; or
• Any other statement as for why it is not possible to make one of the rulings above.

Splitting hair further...
Experts, may be hired (by either or both parties) to look into a case, write a report and make a recommendation.
All signed recommendations can be send to a judge for a final decision to be made.
And finally, an enforcer just do whatever the judge said.

Indeed, one entity may play more than one role.

So the escrow provider may just "apply the judgement of the judge (or judges) specified in the contract"
Experts may be approved either by a contract and/or by a judge.

That is why I said that I used the word escrow for lack of a better word.

In a court system, people sign contract outside of the court, without any judge being involved. If and only if there is a dispute, then one party will bring the contract to the court for a judge to make a ruling. So I guess that "judge" would be a more appropriate word for what I am talking about.

Say Alice and Bob enter a contract, create a multi-sig from which any 2-of-3 can spend the funds, i.e. Alice, Bob and Charlie, where Charlie is a judge.

Alice and Bob sign a contract (with pubKey) and agree that Charlie will be the arbiter if a conflict were to arise, then send the funds to the multi-sig. Meanwhile, as relevant, they sign their communication.

If everything goes well, Alice and Bob cooperatively move the funds as per the contract.

Only if there is a conflict, then either Alice or Bob can hire Charlie, provide him with the contract, the signature and any other relevant information for Charlie to make a decision. Charlie can then co-sign the transaction to enforce the contract.

Unlike with traditional escrow, Charlie does not need to know about even the existence of a contract, unless there actually is a conflict to resolve. Also, Charlie cannot steal the funds without the cooperation of Alice or Bob.

Each judge set his own rules, expertise, etc. For example, he may offer to rule on weather or not a transaction has happened on some blockchain, allowing cross-chain swap without having to implement atomic-swap programmatically.  In case of hiring someone to write some code, a judge could specialize in verifying that the work has been done, or assessing how much of the work has been done.

It can easily get much more flexible, but I don't want to risk adding confusion.... at least yet.

I hope that helps clarifying.

That does not fit what I described. The escrow providers in that list must be involved even when there is no dispute, take custody of the funds, and charge some fee regardless.

I used the word "escrow" for lack of a better word, referring to a third party signer for enforcing arbitration.

Thanks for the link though!

I am looking for independent trusted agents (members with a reputation) to offer escrow and/or arbitration services on-demand.

Right-now, I want to crowdfund some projects, and I need some trusted members to prevent me from screwing anyone as I have no reputation whatsoever. This prompts this quest, yet the goal is for such service to be available to anyone who may (yet hopefully won't) need arbitration.

Unless there actually is a dispute, no agent is involved. i.e. No work, no pay, nor any knowledge that anything happened.

If there is a dispute, any party can then contact the relevant agent(s) to enforce their contracts and gets paid according to each agent's rule.

The task involves:
Signing the release or returns of funds for a fee on demand, and/or
Making a decision or statement for arbitration purposes.

Such service is to be paid according to whatever schedule determined by the agent offering the service.

The decision making and enforcement may be separate. For example Alice may investigate and render a decision, and Bob can enforces whatever decision is made by Alice. While involving multiple agents, it can provide much more flexibility, such as allowing appeals or a broader -- expertise.

The weakness (which is simply a compromise) is the intervention of humans. The advantage is that it allows complex contracts while avoiding the implementation of smart contracts and the risks posed by any potential bugs or back-door.

The goal is that no one ever uses these services for the same reason nobody is producing invalid blocks.

It requires that proper contracts are written, agreed and signed by all participants, so that proof can be provided to agent(s) in case of arbitration.

As for the fees, scope (expertise) and rules, that is up to each agents.

Please makes your offer if you want to be such an agent, and/or share the names/usernames of whoever you trust.

First about venting:

If you are talking about anything resembling the unit on a table exhausting its hot air toward an opened window, the unit will wither be too close, too far or both, depending on the weather. There is no sweet spot, unless you can somehow force a positive pressure in the room. Fans from the unit produce airflow that cannot compensate for the negative pressure in the room.

If you have only one unit, a properly sized air hose from the exhaust of the unit to the outside will "force" the air to go out, and you have to prevent water from following the hose to the unit, for example, by making the air exit below the unit.

Hopefully it is helpful for you next setup, or prevents that mishap to someone else. Unless actively forcing a positive pressure in a building, the wind direction and its environment will decide where air comes in and where it goes out.


Now that it happened...
WARNING: If some part(s) makes some other part(s) fail, then playing around may damage parts that are not yet damaged.

It appears that you may have 2 failed hashboards. Sometimes, somehow, swapping things around fixes stuff for unknown reasons.

If you haven't done so already, you should clean the boards. Removing dirt alone may fix it.

Then look at the logs. Sharing it here may help. You want to know, for example, if the boards are not-detected or detected but malfunctioning. It may literally tell you what is the problem.

After identifying which board is working, you know that its data cable and its power cables are working.
You can test each data port by connecting the working board with the working data cable to each port of the control board.
If the working board does NOT work when connected to the two other data ports, then the control board is almost certainly the (or a) problem.
If the board DOES works in all data ports, then you can test each data cables, then each power cables, etc. to isolate the problem.

A bad hashboard, bad power supply, a bad data cable, a bad connection of the data cable and/or a bad control board, or any combination of those may have the very same symptoms.  The physical position of the parts may squeeze or stretch something just a bit in a way that makes the difference between it working and not working.

If you are equipped to do so and "have a clue" about it, I would suggest testing the power supply first, then testing for short circuits on the hashbords power inputs.

Did you contact Bitmain? It is unlikely covered by the warranty, but they may be able to give you some directions.

Best of luck!

You are correct that GPUs are absolutely not suitable for mining bitcoin. What he is suggesting is to mine [whatever GPU minable crypto] and convert [that crypto] to BTC, e.g. using nicehash.

I chose the word "crypto" over the word "shitcoin" because it sounds so much better. But they can generate profits.

The deeper questions are:
What is your budget?
How much risk are you comfortable with?
What is your technical expertise?
Who can you rely on for the expertise you don't have?

The research and budgeting phases should precede the buying phase.

One machine failure out of 10 machine is unfortunate. But having only one machine and see it fail really sucks.

10k solar will power at most one unit (any S19 model) for reasons already mentioned by others. Then it's fun and games until the thing fails. Then it may or may not be possible to fix. Or it may last long after breaking even.

I think such a failure is relatively unlikely, but I would sleep so much better going from 5 functional units to 4 than from 1 to zero. In that sense, multiplying the setup may be "less risky" in that way.

Now, taking the "10kW one unit" risk knowingly, in a calculated and conscious way, is totally fine. It's better to know what could happen from the start than learning it the hard way.

If I barely had the budget for a 10kW capacity and a single S19, I would not take the risk. Even with no technical issue, it may still never break even.
If your goal is more about getting your hands dirty, learning and having fun than about return on investment, that's counts for a lot.

Have you used some profitability calculators online?
Did you precisely calculate your theoretical cost per kWh over different time frames?


Can you:
Buy and building the setup,
Look at the nice flow of income for a few weeks with a big smile,
Calculate that you expect to break even in 6 month (and so rich in a few years),
Smell some smoke and melted electronic (not covered by warranty or insurance), AND
Still be happy to have tried?

Also, miners that are breaking even at night and very profitable during the day is not too bad.

If the choice is between mining and buying BTC straight up, again the approach is different.

Keep in mind 10k will run AT MOST one miner IF and only if the theory and the environmental conditions all work in your favor.
Also, batteries have a life cycle, and solar panels don't last forever either.

Gambling with 50/50 odds a hundred times (practically) assures me profit, on some of the tosses. On average in the whole run though...

Profit IS assured with daily trading.  What isn't assured is who is going to profit.

Thanks, that's exactly what I was asking about.  That said, I didn't do the math, but 1% (or 2%) of in case I find a block within seconds of another blocks...

How many seconds of latency must a miner save for the odds of a block collision to decrease by 1%?

And don't I have to just trust the claim about being "well connected" or is there a way for a miner to verify that?

I am in no way saying that it doesn't have legitimate use case.  "I'd rather pay a cut than having to bother with all that" is absolutely legit.  As for the connectivity advantage, I still feel that the line is so fine that we may only guess whether it it is worth that 1% or 2%.

Though, considering the current value of the block reward, it's still difficult for me to think that the owner of a farm large enough to mine solo would not want to "bother" doing it itself.

I may be missing something, but how does connecting to ckpool "lower" any latency?  The block header is 80 bytes, and AFAIK most miners are okay with mining an empty block on top of a valid header for a few seconds because "Who the heck would produce a valid header without a valid merkle-root?" Sure, the previous block needs to be downloaded completely to figure which transactions to include in the next block, but we are talking about 2% fee.

So high speed (which I assume means "high throughput" in this context) seems practically (if not completely) unnecessary. Then latency being the main (arguably only) important factor, I remain unconvinced.

A very large miner who want to stay low profile (i.e. not advertise to the world that he has massive mining power) may prefer to appear as a lot of smaller miners. The same way one may prefer to hold large funds across multiple addresses with lower values rather than some large amounts on one or very few addresses. The blockchain is public.

I have a harder time understanding why any "solo miner" would pay 2% to some "service provider" rather than mine on its own.

https://solo.ckpool.org/ lists several use cases.
The lottery one is the only one that really makes sense to me,
A last resort backup also make sense to me,
But in my opinion, neither do not satisfactorily explain the several blocks found recently.

Is it not more likely that a big enough mining farm mines to a lot of different reward address, making it appear as many small solo miners?

Is there ANY indication that it isn't the case? It sure does look like the sun is going around the earth, but there is another explanation.

Even if the said-to-be-different-miners were connected with different IP addresses the whole time, invalidating the possibility of a change of IP address between blocks found, I would still suspect one farm with a bunch of IP addresses. That is so much more probable.

TL;DR  That is scary!

That looks too good to be true.
The reward would be huge; but if it bricks the device, the loss will be huge.
I would only try if I were absolutely comfortable bricking the device.
Even if the software were audited and proven to work perfectly in theory, the hardware is the "in practice" side of the equation. For example, in theory a switch or push button is a simple "true or false" read; in practice, it needs a debouncer and possibly calibration.

A malicious firmware could make the chips run at full power and turn the fans off, thus burning all hashing boards.
At that point, whether it can brick the control board too is relatively irrelevant if all hashboard melted.

A non malicious firmware could do the same because of some bug or by being installed on the wrong target device.

Bitcoin ASICs are probably the most optimized chips ever created. I can't think of any chip with as much incentive for optimization. Yet, some obscure "asic to the moon" website claims to DOUBLE the output of such chips. That also imply that it doubles the performance because the power supply cannot give double the amount of power, nor do its power cables. And the electrical circuit it is connected to probably can't provide that power either.

I think it is also worth to point out that the more device that are taken offline, the lower the global hashrate; so there is an incentive. And a clever malicious firmware could "run just fine for a couple weeks", just long enough to make someone confident to install the same firmware on all its miners, and then strike the whole farm at once.

I would love, sincerely, to hear counterarguments.

I do understand that mining requires node to communicate.  I am talking about communication without internet, not "absence" of a communication link.  I used the word "offline" at the end referring specifically to internet being down, though I understand the confusion and edited that part.  What a goTenna can indeed be compared to "tossing [transactions] in the ocean", but that isn't the topic.

I doubt that governments can't shut that down DBS (Direct Broadcast Satellite).  That would mean that they also can't force BlockStream to stop feeding data to the satellite.  And being centralized, BlockStream itself can decide to stop broadcasting.  But as I said, it is indeed a very good tool that can provide for the inbound part of the communication.

I believe that the operator of a big mining farm would happily use communication channels with a few seconds latency over being completely disconnected and have their hardware sitting idle.

A miner (especially a solo miner) does NOT NEED low latency.  In fact, Bitcoin and Proof-of-Work are DESIGNED for high latency and low throughput.  Lower latency if is financially preferable for miners and reduce the likelihood of stale blocks, but is in no way a requirement for the network to be healthy and fully operational.


Does anyone know if the BlockStream (or any) satellite can receive blocks or transactions? (other than the company itself, of course)

Bitcoin without internet: (for context)
I am considering the synchronization of a node to be partially solved by the BlockStream satellite that broadcast blocks and transactions.  It is centralized, but certainly better than nothing.

It is possible to "broadcast transactions" via radio.  It's been done with HAM radio, and perhaps on other radio bands too.  It does requires someone to receive it and relay the transaction to the internet, but that is unavoidable.  More importantly, radio waves are regulated making it a legal challenge.

It would be easy to setup "base stations" that listen to [some frequencies] and relay any valid transaction that it receives to the internet.  As far as I know, there is no such active relay, though I believe it would be totally legal in most countries and, even where illegal, it would be very difficult to track/down such relay unless they advertise their location.

I have heard of the goTenna, which has some interesting tech for broadcasting transaction.  I don't see how that can be helpful for mining, but looking into it can certainly give some insight.

While far from perfectly reliable, but definitely a suitable backup, one could transmit transactions via SMS.  Now that I think of it, there are a bunch of free services to receive text messages on disposable/temporary phone numbers in most countries across the world.  They could be monitored and valid bitcoin transaction relayed to the Bitcoin network over the internet.  It would take a couple separate messages per transaction, but that could be done.

Solo mining:
To limit the bandwidth required, some scheme may be used to per-determine which transactions are to be included in a block at any time, e.g. relying on what BlockStream has broadcasted up to some time in the past.

For a solo miner, assuming the BlockStream satellite is operational, we only need to "somehow" broadcast at most a couple hundred bytes to a relay (connected to the internet) and that's it.  Given the blocktime, a solo miner can send a SMS for every block found.  Using radio waves is also a potential solution, though legally more complicated.

Pool mining:
For pool mining, as far as I know, the bandwidth required is way too great to use SMS.  I don't like the idea of using SMS in the first place anyway, but that excuses only applies to solo mining.

As far as I understand, shares are submitted to the pool very regularly, i.e. a great handful of times per minutes.  Could it make sense to send the few best shares per block and send that only after a block is found?  It seems to break any payout scheme that I know.

Mining farm can aggregate their mining so that they appear as a single worker to the pool, but that is far from enough.

Using radio-waves (to broadcast) is a legal challenge to start with, and there are a LOT more shares to transmit than there are blocks.  Even with the ability to have each farm send only a few hundreds or thousands bytes for every block, ALL farms would be broadcasting their "few shares" almost at the same time, i.e. when a block is found.

Mining without internet:
Mining cannot afford the propagation delay that transactions do.

The idea is to have a fallback communication network for mining in case of an internet outage.  But during an internet outage, a nearby relay is likely experiencing the same internet outage.

One or a few mining farm(s) going offline for a couple days is not that big of the deal, except for the operator(s).  A backup solution is certainly helpful to such miner, but not critical for the network as a whole.

After much solo reflection, for anything more wide-spread, it seems that such a backup network can only be useful if it actually handles most mining communication.  i.e. if it "can" handle the load but waits around until internet breaks, then we should expect to discover its fatal flaws when it gets under load.  I am mostly thinking about pooled mining.

I swear I din not intend this post to go that far, nor that deep.

That said, maybe BlockStream is even less ideal here and node synchronization has to be addressed just as well.

Summary:
How to enable mining farms and residential miners to keep mining during local, regional or global internet outages?

What communications channels can be used for communication?

How can the bandwidth required for pool mining be reduced?

As a final thought, it appears that a solution for offline mining without internet may well be a solution for sending and receiving transactions without internet.  I hope, however, that I made clear that mining is a different beast.

Do some mining farm and/or mining pool have any sort of private or backup communication channels for blank swans or in the event s..omething hits the fan?

Do you mean "tag"?  Either way, I don't know what that is, and I don't understand your question.  But the following may help:

First note that there is a difference between a public key and an address.  The address is derived from the public key, but is NOT the public key.  While it is possible to search for a vanity public key, I doubt that it is what you want and cannot think of any use for that.  So I assume that you are looking for a vanity address.

The code does not actually generate addresses in a special way that would fits the requirement.  Instead, it generates addresses randomly, and filters out everything that does not match what is wanted.

So as long as valid addresses can accommodate your constraint, then it is possible to modify the code to perform that different check instead of a prefix.

If you want to generate a bitcoin addresses that begins with "54321", that will not work because no address can begin with "5".

Legacy bitcoin address are encoded in Base58:  They must start with "1" and not all characters are allowed.  For example 0,O,o,I and l are not valid; for some apparent reason, therefore "039efe7" or "02b81669" would not be possible.

In case yo are looking for a bech32 (or taproot) address, I think the tool does not support that, at least yet.  Anyway, it is definitely possible to add such support if needed, though it would involve much more work.

The two examples you provided (039efe7 or 02b81669) are hexadecimal strings, which confuses me.  Are you are looking for a vanity address for something other than Bitcoin?

I hope that helps!

It's divisible, so the quantity is irrelevant.  The lightning network already divide it a thousand times more.  There are 2.1 quintillion millisatoshi already, which can be divided more in the future.  Some notes of "100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar" have been printed.  That's a very large number, but what is it good for?

Scarcity is not a bug, it is one of the very very few main and most crucial feature of Bitcoin, decentralization being another.  And until now and for decades to come, it can be mined.  And outside the cartel printing money for itself devaluing every other dollar in the process, how do people acquire dollars anyway if not from other people who already have some?

I'm not sure what how you think that happens.  Printing money doesn't create value, it dilutes (steals aka "redistributes") the value.  And how do you "open a budget", what losses are you trying to "cover"?

Removing items with high inflation from the "basket of good" and putting items with low inflation instead gives a lower official inflation number.  It doesn't reduce it, it just pretends it isn't there.  Balancing the sheets by writing numbers down creates illusions, not value.

Just like it is impossible for any country to make Bitcoin as legal tender?  And is the lightning network not evolving year after year?

If a company that uses the USD start accepting Bitcoin only... and pay its employees and its providers in Bitcoin, it effectively replaced the dollar as far as it is concerned.  It becomes about how much and how fast that happens.

So it will probably remain impossible until it happens.  If it never happens, it's very likely because Bitcoin will have failed, and it is likely that the US dollar will disappear well before that.  The value of the dollar almost completely disappeared already anyway.  It may not happen in 2022 though.

The universe will die, and so will Bitcoin and the USD, but it will not happen in that order.  I think that Bitcoin is set to survive the USD.

And the governments will never let that happen.  It will just happen is spite of them.

The answer above are right and accurate in my opinion, but wouldn't convince me or help much if I didn't already know. 
Trying to add what seemed missing made me realize that the answer is not as obvious as it seemed to be at first glance.

Why couldn't there be a way to remove the intensive of mining half of the time?

If that was achievable, then the miner would redirect their mining power to another chain that uses the current PoW system, forfeiting the purpose.  However, that doesn't prove that such a scheme can't work or can't exist.  It means, at most, that it would not achieve the intended the result.

I think understating Proof of Work is key to understand how it doesn't make much sense to "pause" mining, just like understanding what animals crossing signs are for helps with the question about how they know where they have to cross, yet without providing an answer.

Analogy:
Mining is voting with energy.  So to make an analogy, attributing a number of vote by unit of energy is akin to using feet or meters.  Changing the unit of measurement will change the number, but the distance remains the same.  Miners will tend to mine with all the energy or power they have.

Misconception:
It may seem at first that blockchain requires mining, which has the side effect of requiring a lot of energy, but it is the other way around.

What is mining?
The purpose of mining is to impose a cost on voting.  For an anonymous vote to mean and be worth something, it must cost and prove something.  Hashing is how that it's done, i.e. we purposely uses electricity, or energy, to give value to votes.  If it didn't cost anything to vote, it would make cheating free, which would makes any votes worthless.  So hashing converts energy into a digital vote.

Each hash proves that an equivalent amount of energy was spent, and that proof is a digital representation of it, aka a vote.  We then chain them so that they pile up, so each link in the chain represent the total amount on energy accumulated in that chain from its conception up to there.

Energy is constantly flowing into the chain, and the chain is backed by the SUM of all the energy of all votes in its entire history,

It also constitute a global clock that provide timestamps.

Blockchain integration:
Integrating data (e.g. transactions) into that timestamp makes it a block, and the resulting energy chain becomes what we know as the Bitcoin blockchain.

So the blockchain contains the ledger, i.e. what we and to set in stone, and each block is one more tick of that clock that seals the latest transactions along with everything that precedes it.  It is an energy chain attesting what happened, at what time, and in which order.

The value and immutability of that blockchain come from the accumulated energy that attest its authenticity, the proof being hashes.

By rewarding honest voters, we incentivize people to spend energy to verify and votes, and the largest decentralized industry is born.

Because honest vote get rewarded, and dishonest votes are very costly, incentives enforce honesty.  The game theory is more complex, but that's the gist of it.

How can we force those voters to stop voting half of the time?
How do we stop that global timestamping machine half the time?

The limiting factors:
Alongside capital to invest in the mining hardware itself, electricity is very often the top limiting factor.

One may have the money and space to put 300x S19 Pro in their basement or in some spare bedroom in an apartment, but can they feed them the 1 Megawatt+ of power required?  I'm sure someone somewhere can find a way, but the electricity requirement is always limiting.  Does that make it unfair and "more centralized" because only those with access to a lot of electricity can mine that much?  I don't know.  Wouldn't they have at least proportionally more mining power if the limitations due to electricity were removed (partially or totally) from the equation?

The foundation of the value of Bitcoin is the electricity it uses, even though all the technology on top of it is required to make it what is is.  The amount of energy itself is the driving factor.  How much mining, how may hashes, etc. are irrelevant, because miners will typically push their capacity to the power they have available.

Comparison with Proof-of-Stake:
If the goal was to do things efficiently, we could pay the cost of centralization.  Proof-of-stake is just a bit in between.  Whoever owns some stake (e.g. token) has a proportional voting power and have no externality.  Stake holders can keep voting in perpetuity without incurring further cost.

If one person buys enough votes, he becomes the king and we are back to what is essentially a centralized system.

In PoS, bootstrapping it requires some method other method of distribution, because there must be some stake before any voting can even happens.

Rewriting the chain is trivial with enough stake or collusion.

In Proof-of-Work, miners buy hardware, which has an upfront cost and maintenance cost, but most importantly running cost.  The hardware is NOT a vote, and does NOT vote either.  It merely converts energy into votes.  As soon as the energy stops flowing, the voting halts.

No bootstraping is required.