This new patch has been tested and is generating (at least in a test network), and the move of scratch space into thread local memory has improved performance quite a bit, from ~1880kh/s to ~3000kh/s on my system.

Did anyone succeed in building and testing on other platforms / GPUs?

Ok, I'm done with Pick3, lost almost all of my coins on it... it worked out great... for other people.

So, say hello to Pick4. It's 1:65546 instead of 1:4096, maybe this way enough people will have time to bet. It's all about the number of betters,really. It seems that the bitpick didn't become the automatic success I thought it would be.

Also, I've been thinking about the lottery prizes and for the next one I'm getting rid of 1 hit prizes. 1 in 16 is just too easy and it dilutes the total pot too much... I'll run some numbers as for the new pool division percentages, but share your mind if you have an idea of what these should be.

Yeah, while implementing the cuda hasher I thought about this. There should be an interface to the hashing handler (or even a full miner per implementation) and we should have a simple way of giving it a known block, ask it to hash 1000 nonces and compare the result, while benchmarking at the same time. Shouldn't be too hard to implement and would help when developing new algorithms.

The interface schema would also help if we were to plug in an fpga based engine or something of the kind, having specific entry points into the code without having to tweak on the default mining schema.

I have my Q6600@2.4G clocked properly at 3.2Ghz and the fan runs full speed, go figure I do crack an extra 50% hashes from it, though.

Yes, that's true, you can loose. I'm the one behind the wheel and I've only lost so far :p

But mining right now, on commodity hardware, is almost a certain loss. And it's not only electricity, the cpu fans are bound to fail soo too! And running at top temp certainly impacts life span of components.

Nice! I've wanted to get into FPGA's too, and bitcoin seems very fitting, but unfortunately time doesn't stretch that much.

BTW, the code I posted is slightly broken If the cuda thread generates a valid block it will die, for where it reads in main.cpp:


          if (DEBUG || hash <= hashTarget) {
            pblock->nNonce = keep+i;
            break;
          }

it shoudl read

          if (DEBUG || hash <= hashTarget) {
            pblock->nNonce = tmp.block.nNonce = keep+i;
            break;
          }

I don't think that the bias should be towards the ones with better printers having more money The Bitcoins are a whole ecosystem, and mining for them is a small part of it, I guess. If lots of people start running GPU based mining, then the advantage that was owned by artforz and a handful of others will blend into more hands and pockets, thus making the mining less efficient for everyone. But mining is part statistics, part luck. I recently generated 3 blocks, running a machine that has been mining non stop for over a month. These 3 blocks are the only blocks it ever generated.

Of course artforz would like to keep the advantage. Heck, I could use this to my advantage too, but I'd rather take the open source business approach and say "here, take it, my treat" but expect you to do the same for me and others (yes, trust is the base for this), and if you like it, I'll take whatever you feel fair. You want me to do something specific? need suport? Well, priority and special attention comes with a cost.

I may never get as many coins as artforz created, but I hope I did my share on helping to spread them


I've got a GT330M, really basic entry level thing. And you are most welcome.

Honestly, I can't understand all the secrecy on the CUDA / OpenCL / Whatever GPU enabled versions of bitcoin. Sure, it's nice to take advantage of the extra edge you get if you want to build an efficient mining farm, but really, what's up with everyone on this regard?

So, not really having the time to do it, I decided to take my first cup of CUDA (as all I have as hw to test is a macbook pro with a nvidia inside), and I'm attaching the initial version here. Yes, the source, for you to do as you please! Just remember the reason you got it in the first place, which was that someone didn't take it and hide!

Anyways, it's *really* crude, has static compile instructions on the makefile, only for osx and with the cuda dev sdk in the default place, compiled for x86_64. But I'm sure you can quickly tweak it to compile for your system, though...

The code that runs in the GPU is a 1:1 copy of the Cryptopp source, only slightly tweaked. There's a lot of room for improvement, I have some 20 hours total of working with CUDA so I don't have the faintest idea of what optimizations I could achieve, but at least in the memory layout there's a lot to do. I compared the resulting hashes with Cryptopp and it matches, so I'm assuming it can generate blocks. I'm tired and thus haven't tried a local network, but I will soon.

I get 1400khs from the CPU with all cores combined, and 1800khs from the GPU alone, so it's pretty nice. It does take a lot of cpu still, for some reason, so run it with cores-1 or you'll loose performance. I *think* the hashes per second calculation is correct, but may not be.

The first processor is always the cuda, it will not run if you don't have the GPU / kernel, no error handling, ugly hackish code throughout, but it serves as a start. Lets get this production grade to include in the main clients, shall we?

Now, if you want to thank me for doing this just head to http://taabl.datlatec.com and place a few bets. I'm starting to think the time I spent developing the lottery wasn't worth it, as it got too little interest so far, so it would be super if you all gave it a try.

If you want me to continue to pursue this, then toss a good amount of coins my way or send me some hardware. I have linux and windows machines, but not the GPU for them, so *wink* *wink*

Most of all, share your code!

Or, in other words, you have a much better chance of getting some coins if you play on http://taabl.datlatec.com

*ducks*

You can double check by looking at the details page. Under 'Total Bets' there is the count of confirmed bets, and the unconfirmed ones are gray and italic in the bet list (underlined if yours).

Right now there are 10 bets unconfirmed.

And another pick went by, another chunk of bitcoins removed from my personal wealth... Come on, people, we need critical mass here! Go on and bet!

On a side note, the payment for the pick was automated and a new one should had been created on the fly, but there was a small bug preventing that... should be good for the next one.

I'm doing backups every time I create a new address and when I send btcs. Receiving should be safe? Also, I'm collecting other stuff and doing offsite scp based backups of the wallet, meaning I have the trigger embedded in my program logic, but auto backups would be great, as one can look for changes in the backup file and use that as trigger to do the offsite.

But what I *really* think would rock is some kind of event mechanism

Yep, that did the trick. Thank you.

Now I just need you to include the getblock and listtransactions patches and I'm a happy camper. If you still feel strongly against these, I just need parts of them, really:
- From getblock: A way to extract the hash signature from a specific block (which I use in the lottery)
- From listtransactions: Well, I need everything there, really, but mostly for housekeeping as I need a way of quickly getting a log of transactions. But not all information is important, only the address (in or out, depending on credit or debit) the type and the confirmation count. I also like to be able to see blocks generated before they mature, but that's not that important.

I've been getting this from the start, and it is only a mild nuisance as I develop in OSX but then deploy on linux.

Anyway, the bitcoind process doesn't daemonize itself on my system, OSX 10.6, not with nor without -daemon. I can background it with '&' or ctrl-z bg, and it works correctly.

Woot, double thumbs up on this. Great work, satoshi!

Yep, exactly. No bets are returned on the lottery, as there is no wait period. Bets are not accepted within 6 blocks of draw.


The reason for this is not to avoid people doing crazy things, but to prevent me, as the lottery operator, to cheat on the betters. There's a buffer of 6 blocks (roughly 1 hour) where you can download all the active bets, so if you take a snapshot of the bets every half hour (just to be safe) you can verify if I'm not putting false bets after the result block is known.

If people rather not have this wait period and just trust me, so be it, but I don't want to even have a chance of cheating, be it on purpose or due to bugs in the software. Also, if my time runs too short I may hand this over to someone else, but I'm a better myself so I'd rather be able to make sure that person will not even have the chance to cheat on me.

It's not I don't trust people, I just think that if trust is not an issue everything goes smoothly

This is just getting silly

I can't automate the Pick if it closes in 6 blocks! Either this is just one of those really unlikely events that will probably not happen again, or I need to add another character to the bets...

I'm opening another one, and use this to exercise the 'give back bets that didn't get confirmation blocks'.

Thank you! You saved me a bunch of number crushing, although I had the empirical feeling that the 100BTC seed was probably a bit too much. I'm not trying to get rich out of this, obviously, but I'd really rather not loose all my bitcoins to it either. As such, I'm going to seed the next few pick 3s at 50BTC, which seems like a great compromise. If we get a lot of people betting, great, if I'm in profit the seeds will increase. If I loose it all, well, tough, I'll just stick to the other lottery

Hey FreeMoney, you have officially been appointed TAABL's favorit charity cause

Heh, congratulations! So it was you who took all my seed btcs

Yes, you haven't been paid yet, the pay script was horribly broken so I'll fix that today and then open a new one. I just hope more betters come in on this one before we get a winner or I'm better off just giving the seed money away :p

Other than the fact the house looses too easily, this Pick 3 schema seems very interesting, so I think that as long as I can afford it, I'll keep it up.