Full Node Acting Very Strange (Please Help!)

[TigerStripeRIT]

Hello everyone. So over the last week, I've created my own altcoin using the Litecoin v0.8 source code for a university side project. Currently, the coin is fully functional, with a working wallet, send/receive, mining rewards, and even auto-connection to a DNS seed leading to a VPS (my full node hosted on DigitalOcean). Everything seems to be working great, except some really strange behavior from the full node (which also acts as the default DNS seed). When I run my node with either

Code:

./tigerstriped -server -printtoconsole

or

Code:

./tigerstriped -server -listen=1 -printtoconsole

It starts up and connects as usual to any wallets online. But, after a few minutes, it will start mining/processing blocks on the blockchain at a pretty fast rate. As I said, I am no expert so I'm not 100% sure if this is normal, but it seems to infinitely process empty blocks continuously at a rate much faster than that of my wallets mining from the debug window. I have tried console commands in the VPS like

Code:

./tigerstriped setgenerate false

to which I usually receive a blank response. Even weirder, I took all my wallets offline and stopped the full node for the night. The block height was at around 170. I come back this morning, start the full node and my wallet, and suddenly there is a block height of 700+! How could my node be processing/mining while it was offline after using

Code:

./tigerstriped stop

. Keep in mind nobody knows or has access to my wallets, so nobody could have been mining blocks. When I started the node, it spammed the console with hundreds of blocks found, as if it was mining while offline and would confirm when it was started back up again. I have never been so confused and frustrated. Is there even a command to stop this behavior? If my full node is processing a thousand empty blocks a day, the coin will half in just a few months. Maybe I am incorrect and the full node is supposed to process blocks forever? Could this be a result of connecting two wallets together and mining before connecting a masternode?

I've attatched a few pastebins for hopefully more clarity. Please let me know if there is any debug.log or file or console you need me to share in order to help out.


Full Node VPS Console (Startup message): https://pastebin.com/LuTFi09L

Full Node VPS Console (Processing blocks automatically): https://pastebin.com/JFfDga2m
^^^ These same messages show up in the debug.log in all of my valid wallets! What???

I have absolutely no idea where to turn. Any idea on where to look, what to change, or which pastebins to make for further clarity would be greatly appreciated.

[achow101]

-printtoconsole doesn't make it magically start mining. It's literally just an option that causes the debug messages that normally go into the debug.log to also be printed to stdout. It's the same as doing tail -f debug.log while your node is running.

Your node, or some other node in your network, is continuously mining and -printtoconsole has nothing to do with it except that now you are seeing the debug messages.

Are you sure that you are the only node on your network?

What block time did you choose?

[TigerStripeRIT]

-printtoconsole doesn't make it magically start mining. It's literally just an option that causes the debug messages that normally go into the debug.log to also be printed to stdout. It's the same as doing tail -f debug.log while your node is running.

Your node, or some other node in your network, is continuously mining and -printtoconsole has nothing to do with it except that now you are seeing the debug messages.

Are you sure that you are the only node on your network?

What block time did you choose?

Yes I am aware that -printtoconsole is simply just an extension asking to print to console. I'm actually wondering if there is a different flag to DISABLE whatever mining this node is doing. Currently I have one node hosted on digital ocean and two wallets on virtual ubuntu desktops. I have not released any code or wallet software to allow for others to join. This is further proven by the wallet displaying "1 active connection to TigerStripe network" (which in this case is my full node). My block time is targeted at around 5 minutes. The mining itself works great on any wallet, taking 5-10 minutes, but this node seems to just process a block out of thin air every thirty seconds.

I did, after rechecking the full node console, notice a strange IP that seemed to trace back to Russia? Would any mining that IP is doing show up on the full node's console? I guess my main confusion is whether the full node on digitalOcean is mining or if some wallet out there compiled using my source code from the public Github is doing it. Then again, I don't know why anybody would go through the trouble of cloning, compiling, and mining my coin which is basically worth nothing.

[achow101]

From the log snippets you have posted, it is clear that your node is not mining. There would be different messages if your node were mining. Rather, you see messages like:

Code:

received block 7a78eb489bc70e40d39700e2c3a54b1ea688cf0df0e5b9195a6715695b7e8640

which indicates that your node has received a new block. Your node did not mine that block, it received it from another node and validated it. So you have some other node on your network that is mining blocks very quickly. That node is not mining at all.

It is highly likely that someone has found your code on GitHub and is running their own node on your network. It is common for people with ASICs to jump onto new altcoin networks and just mine tons of blocks at insane rates using their ASICs. Typically they then leave once they bring the difficulty up very high such that once they leave, no one else using that coin will be able to mine on it, effectively killing it.