so, i think others can just turn off their clients and throw away this winningless game?  i think this monopoly is not the best idea to promote bitcoin You know, I think it doesn't really work like that... I've been slowly generating with a 1MH/s machine, regardless of difficulty. It helps (a lot) to have the power, but luck is always part of it  |
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I'll throw up $50.
I suppose we will pay you this money with bitcoins??? What is the best way to turn a credit card into bitcoins?
What happens with the "profits", how can we monitor the progress, how this all gonna work, etc?
I imagine a bitcoind server would handle automated payments to participating members?Can bitcoin handle subscription payments? Maybe paypal or cc subscription might be a good way to manage the monthly cost . Forgive me for being an ass, but if you guys do this, there will be someone else who will think "I want a cut, but not share it" and do this too, and probably a 3rd one will emerge, and my gut feeling is that there isn't enough to share amongst everyone. We will be generating 50x the notmal amount and, while difficulty updates are capped, it is sure to throw many more coins on the market than we expect. And you guys see the inherent value of bitcoins, but others will not and just sell all they generate on the spot (on the month bill cycle, probably) at whatever price they get. Great for buying, but still... Having said all this, I'm in for $50 too, and can create an automated manager, but I lack the time right now. |
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Ok, Sunday is here and I think that I'm just going to let this sit for now. USD/EUR exchange is not favorable for me and the offers aren't that high so I'm going to do this step by step instead of just throwing myself head first. I have bought nVidia card for my development desktop, which will help me both dig into OpenCL and have a better notion of how to work with a more common (i.e. non laptop) setup.
I'll use the very generous donation I got to help in that, but will just put my own money for the rest (FYI a great deal, I believe; €65/$90 for a GTS250, in the box as new). I will then buy the new MoBo and an ATI card, but sometime in the future.
Thanks for the offers, though, I really appreciate it.
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Is there a clean, complete HOWTO about this subject (How to backup) ? AFAIK I just made backup.sh script in my .bitcoin folder : #!/bin/bash
gpg -r $USERNAME -e wallet.dat
sftp $USERNAME@SOME_STORAGE_SERVICE.com <<EOF
put wallet.dat.gpg
EOF
I wonder if I should or not keep a backup history or something (backup.dat.1.gpg, backup.dat.2.gpg, etc.). What do you think ? I think you are asking for trouble The correct way would be to add an rpc call to backupwallet (which is supported from 0.3.12) passing a file path, and then do the gpg/sftp dance on that file. It might require you to, if running a GUI, start the program with the -server switch, though. |
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It finally happened, I have corrupted my wallet file beyond any hope. Good thing I only spare change there Anyway, no more nelisky on the list, please! no reason sending the coins to nowhere at all. As soon as I make a little sense out of my 10+ bitcoin clients running with different wallets and versions I'll post a new address. And I'm running behind too, I owe you guys 6 payments already... ouch! At least you didnt lose over 9000!  Yeah, I'm careful with the wallets I play with, but there is a very low statistical probability that I loose 9000 coins anyway... Summing all my wallets I have ~2600 |
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I think that nelisky is one of the dev-team. A hacker by heart and trade  And no, from my personal experience I never managed to break a wallet using satoshi's deploys... but then again I'm not using them all that often. I broke my own wallet, my fault, nothing to see here! |
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nelisky: Integrating CUDA/OpenCL seems to have portability issues. Also, my goal is actually to convince satoshi to patch the mainline. The patch must be crystal clear for this to happen.
Yes, that is one of my biggest concerns. I don't have enough exposure to assert in multiple platforms / hw. And I have failed to provide a simple click and use distributable, as of yet, but as interest increases and more developers tackle this I'm sure one of us will provide a clean implementation that is production quality for satoshi. |
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I hope someone will try this wonderful OpenCL bitcoin miner. It uses PyOpenCl. Should be generally platform independent. The OpenCL kernel uses previous work by laszlo. You will need bitcoin patched with this to enable RPC getwork(). You may use as many external miners as you wish (if running RPC with -rpcallowip). Have fun. Amazing solution! Not good for the masses (it's better to integrate the miner in the binary) but great for experimentation and multiple machine mining. I'll be sure to have a go at this when I get a sec, kudos for putting this out. |
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The network will eventually be run by "oligarchs". Once software is optimized as far as it can be, it will come down to hardware, bandwidth, and, in the long-term, electricity generation. Most people won't be able to keep up.
It will if proof-of-work comes down to something as specialized as solving a single, well-defined, simple, and predictable hash function such as SHA-2. We need to make proof-of-work more choatic and complex if we want to avoid this. SHA-2 was actually designed to be computationally EASY because it's original purpose was digital signing, not proof-of-work. Otherwise, it will end just like you say. Think of this vision of the year 2020: 2/3 of the world's Ghash/s is controlled by just three companies. They manufacture their own specialilsed HPUs (hash processing units) and feed them with custom-built power plants. The Chinese goverment then persuades the three companies to double spend 10% of all transactions into the Chinese government's bitcoin address, in return the companies get an exclusive deal on the rare earths they badly need for the HPU manufacture. Some people leave Bitcoin for alternative currencies without the 10% "tax", but most tolerate it because by then Bitcoin is accepted almost universally. Generation will be less and less interesting in that way, as the coins per block will divide by 2 until there's no coins generated at all, and the system will need to be run by "volunteers", which aren't really volunteers because if no block is generated no coins can be transfered, thus removing all value from all coins... I think it's an arms wrestle to try to avoid having a few people holding most of the coins, that's all. I was trying to leverage that by making everyone have a fair chance at getting coins while they are still being generated, but I fear that it is not practical.. When it comes to currencies (and I don't want to get into a semantics discussion, humour me with 'currency') people are just wired in a very egotistic way, and even when offered the chance to balance the scoreboard, they will just try and use that to their own advantage, not everyone's... it saddens me, really, but hey I'll keep on doing what I do because I strongly believe in it, just as others believe in taking the largest slice. |
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But now, it seems that an increasingly small and exclusive elite has taken charge of coin/block generation. It's dominated by specialists who have access to wholesale means of production and secret, proprietary GPU code.
The average user no longer has a fighting chance and has given up generating blocks altogether.
It's always been the plan for block generation to not be profitable for most people. It's supposed to be done mainly by dedicated "backbone" entities. What's stronger: a thousand people producing 1 Gh/s with hardly any individual economic interest in preserving the network's integrity, or five businesses producing the same Gh/s that will fail if they or someone else destabilizes the network? I'm not saying that GPU code shouldn't be made, but it's not fair to say that GPU generators are "taking without giving back". People dedicated to generating deserve a head-start on new technologies. I was under the impression that coin generation was a way to make sure everyone had a fair chance of putting effort against coins, thus avoiding any central committee of deciding the future of bitcoins. Decentralized is the word, I believe... But I get it, if you put the time and money into getting better miners, you should be able to keep it to yourself, so the 4way patch should never had been merged into mainline, as its creator would have 2x+ performance over the same machine running common clients. I have to disagree here. Yes, competition is good and valuable, and people should not get into bitcoins for the mining alone, but if you let a small subset of people hold most of the future generated coins you are putting the whole project in danger of abuse and destruction... but I may be overreacting. I'll be glad to stop posting code, buy some serious hw and just do the generation myself. As difficulty goes up and people stop generating, this gets more and more statistically interesting... you say I should, right? |
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I feel like puddinpop has an excellent GPU client for the CUDA. running on .3.12 an old 8800gt does just fine with it.
What the community needs is an openCL version. Both of my new machines both have ATI cards in it. You said yourself that openCL runs on both nvidia and ati, so it could definitely be the best supported across multiple platforms.
Best of luck though.
Duly noted. I'll certainly consider that as I move on. I do think that OpenCL is the way to go, I'm really just not seeing enough interest in it other than a selected few. As a matter of fact, I'm not seeing much interest in the whole GPU mining, awkwardly enough. It is, for me, a question of what I can best do with my time, as I have very little of it, but every now and then I take a stab at OpenCL, so I'm moving that way already! I think puddinpop was working on opencl already, so maybe he'll just beat me to it. I won't share my technical view of his approach here, that has been done elsewhere already, but if you are satisfied with his code, maybe we should just bump his thread and ask for updates? |
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Someone should work on making the GPU code open. That is the best way to stop this.
That's exactly what nelisky is doing. Feel free to follow his link and help him. Have done, actually. There is working (and generating) code already available here. It is known to work on OSX 10.6 (my dev environment) and linux (myself on ubuntu 10.04 and the Russian folks I'm not sure what OS). The mentioned thread is a request for help in pursuing this, which I will with or without said help so you can safely ignore and still have a go at the outcome. The difference will be the amount of effort I put in this and thus the time to completion. I'd also be happy to have someone else pick up the code too, but I fear all that have done so already are generating on their own, not giving anything back. The complete lack of developer feedback seems to point that way, at least. But, hey, we're only human, and we were taught to take advantage of the situation everytime we can, I understand. I'm just trying to teach my kids otherwise, by showing them being generous can work too Thanks for the work you are doing. My pleasure, really. But in all fairness, it is not true I don't get both appreciation and donations. What happens is the folks that do support me do so in a very altruistic way, as in "that sounds great for the community, keep it up" kind of way. These helping members do not have, to the best of my knowledge, any particular interest in the work I do, just think it helps everyone out. The ones that have the hardware to take advantage of this, if they do exist, keep very, very silent |
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Someone should work on making the GPU code open. That is the best way to stop this.
That's exactly what nelisky is doing. Feel free to follow his link and help him. Have done, actually. There is working (and generating) code already available here. It is known to work on OSX 10.6 (my dev environment) and linux (myself on ubuntu 10.04 and the Russian folks I'm not sure what OS). The mentioned thread is a request for help in pursuing this, which I will with or without said help so you can safely ignore and still have a go at the outcome. The difference will be the amount of effort I put in this and thus the time to completion. I'd also be happy to have someone else pick up the code too, but I fear all that have done so already are generating on their own, not giving anything back. The complete lack of developer feedback seems to point that way, at least. But, hey, we're only human, and we were taught to take advantage of the situation everytime we can, I understand. I'm just trying to teach my kids otherwise, by showing them being generous can work too |
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Pooled generation: +1 Add more hash functions... how would this balance the generation? People with better hw would still generate more, in all hash functions. Maybe not GPU / massive parallel, but any problem more/better hardware can't help resolve is probably out of general user's boundaries. GPU and unfairness. Realize that the hardware needed to stand a chance of generating isn't all that cutting edge or expensive. Any mid-level gamer machine has the engine to put out 20 or 30 million hashes/sec, at least. The real issue is software, as this gives the owner of such software a huge advantage for a very small price, thus people will obviously take advantage of this as long as possible. I feel stupid, really. I could put a little more money/effort into this, say nothing about it, and generate away. Instead here I am with my sense of community duty and such... damn, I'll never get rich this way If you feel strongly as to the need for fairness, why don't you Help the little ol CUDA developer? |
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It finally happened, I have corrupted my wallet file beyond any hope. Good thing I only spare change there Anyway, no more nelisky on the list, please! no reason sending the coins to nowhere at all. As soon as I make a little sense out of my 10+ bitcoin clients running with different wallets and versions I'll post a new address. And I'm running behind too, I owe you guys 6 payments already... |
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Ahhh, go opencl... not cuda  ATI Radeon 5770 for about $130. NVIDIA GTS 250 for under $100. What other parts do you need? A video card should be the only thing you need to develop on. $400 could get you a whole system to work in. I could send a SATA hard drive and DDR2 memory like a gig. If you're in the states. Edit - Damnit, I know who you are nelisky, we've chatted and you aren't in the states. What is on your hardware list? I'd hate to ship it to you and get dinged for customs more than it's worth. That's the exact problem, I'm not in the states I don't even need a GPU, I've got a mac, and a very modest cuda enabled laptop running linux. The thing is, there are multiple things I want to achieve: - Proper hw detection, need to get a completely different platform (even though I'm only working on CUDA currently). I have my mining machine all set up, a good quad core, 6GB of ram, lots of hard drive and all my linux dev environment. What it lacks? A CUDA/OpenCL GPU - Proper tuning functions, as simple config changes yield a huge difference. But manually recompiling sucks, and I end up tuning to the one card I'm developing for. - Multiple card support. This is really important to scale. Unfortunately my motherboard supports a single PCI-e x16 interface, I need to get another one for two (that's €75 for a used one, at least) - OpenCL I can do even on nvidia only, but I'd sure like to get this running on ATIs. But as it stands, doing OpenCL means redoing a lot of work, and frankly I don't own a single ATI card, and while some community members offered to send me some, it always gets dropped half way through. My current plan is to get a dual pci-e mobo and a couple of fairly good nvidia cards, aiming at one 8800GTX for €85 and a GTS250 for €60, that's current bid, we'll see how high it gets. Add S&H of about €10 for each and you have my $400 plan (including paypal's fees for EUR exchange). But I could be convinced to tackle the opencl path, if there are enough people interested. It is really not a question of money, but rather of time to market. The cuda I have done, and needs some TLC to be widely used, whereas the opencl will take a fair amount of time to be usable, and on top of that I just need the cuda. But hey, I will do opencl sooner or later, that's for sure! I might even get myself a 5770 just to force myself into doing it! Please do not send any hw from the states, it will get stopped at customs and I'll have to pay the ridiculous fees that usually are higher than the cost of the hw. Not to mention it takes 5 weeks to receive the damn packages Everyone: I'm not trying to rip people off, I'm loosing a LOT of income by dedicating time to this, but only because I feel it is worth it. Having said that, if anyone wants to donate a high-end tesla GPU I will not refuse :p |
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I have received an anonymous donation from a forum member, a wooping $50. So $350 is my current target, maybe even less if I don't get outbid on some local auctions |
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I'll take the lottery site as collateral. I'd honor all tickets and deposits of course.
Hmm, Nelisky has 2000 to unload, and the pick6 is 2100.... j/k...
The graphics card code isn't valuable tome directly or I'd just give you a prepayment for it+support. It's hot here so I'm not going to set up a generating plant. ;-)
Heh, yeah, lots of money to be made on the lottery. Anyone wants to buy me out? I'd disclose the total profit I made so far but... I' ashamed to admit it And I do have a lot of coins bet on the pick6, a grand total of 121. I gotta say, don't know what I'll do with all these coins, they're burning my crypto pockets! Anyway, the code is actually not worth much to any individual alone, unless it is kept closed as it has been by some fellow members of the community. What I'm trying to achieve is effectively neutralize the value of that code for the benefit of the community as a whole. It sounds a bit lame, saying out loud, but the simple fact remains; as difficulty increases the generation becomes much more valuable to the few that have the mega crunchers, and a money pit for everyone else. Doesn't feel right... |
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I should have been clear: this is a patch against the latest 'vanilla' svn.
Oh, well, thanks again Boy, you're fast... |
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Any chance of getting a patch against the vanilla svn? I have a heavily tweaked code base (cuda and a collection of patches).
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