Generating Bitcoins with your video card (OpenCL/CUDA)

[kwukduck]

great idea, take an open source project, make a closed source mod that sends you cash, profit.

no thanks i'll wait for an open version, who knows what happens to my wallet using this thing..

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[nelisky]

great idea, take an open source project, make a closed source mod that sends you cash, profit.

no thanks i'll wait for an open version, who knows what happens to my wallet using this thing..

I have nothing against closed source by itself, and I surely understand the profit taken after hard work has been done, me being a coder working on the comercial arm of an open source project. But that's where my positive reasoning ends.

Charging for work is important, but not so much taking a ransom. And are these 5 BTCs per generated block only from blocks generated using the GPU? And are 4 of these 5 given to satoshi and all the others working on the open source?

Anyway, still crude and already outdated but look here -> http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1009.msg12264#msg12264
I didn't understand what all the fuss was about in this cuda development so I decided to take a stab at it. I only have very limited time, but I am now testing a version doing 6Mh/s as opposed to teh 1.4MHs I get from the CPU. And it has only been mildly optimized, so there's still much room for improvement.

My hardware is limited too, so I only tested in my OSX cli client, but the idea is there for other to work on. I can be convinced to work harder on it, but this was just proving a point for me.

[puddinpop]

There is no ransom involved.  Use of the client is at the will of the user, and the cost is explained and known about up front.  Would you feel better if there was a single large up front cost for each user?  The way it is now, the cost is proportional to the number of blocks you generate, which I think is much more fair.  Otherwise it will be severely disproportionate for those who use it very little or have a slow GPU and those who use it a lot on a fast GPU.

Now I have seen a few say they would be willing to donate for an open source client.  I would be willing to release the source provided a large enough donation is made.

[BitLex]

And are 4 of these 5 given to satoshi and all the others working on the open source?

would be nice, i'd then even think about using it.

did a few more tests on puppin's client, more to check results of gpu-OC'ing though.
so far i was able to squeeze another ~10Mhash outof my GTX260, get ~42Mhash now
(default clock 575/1240/1000, OC'ed 700/1500/1200).

i also tested my older 8600GT, which gets about 5200khash stock, 6500khash slightly OC'ed,
on a dual-core amd be-2350 (cpu gets <2000).
not sure yet, what extra-power the card consumes, system without card is/was around 60Watt @100% cpu load,
the card is powered by PCIe only, so it's max.+75W, my guess is <120W for the system.
gpu-mining would even here be "more effective" than cpu-mining, but prolly still non-profitable.

anyone tested (or able to) an ION platform yet?
those are pretty cheap and using a dual-core ULV cpu they won't need much power.


both testings run quite stable (OCed for about 20hrs) but didnt generate anything.
guess i'm done for now, as soon as there's another client, i'll get back testing.  

[nelisky]

There is no ransom involved.  Use of the client is at the will of the user, and the cost is explained and known about up front.  Would you feel better if there was a single large up front cost for each user?  The way it is now, the cost is proportional to the number of blocks you generate, which I think is much more fair.  Otherwise it will be severely disproportionate for those who use it very little or have a slow GPU and those who use it a lot on a fast GPU.

Now I have seen a few say they would be willing to donate for an open source client.  I would be willing to release the source provided a large enough donation is made.

Right, I may simply be dense, sorry. The way I see it, you did an amazing job which I, unfortunately, can't make use of. If I could, maybe I'd gladly give the 5 coins to you, who knows? But the fact remains that while I feel that this has a niche to it, and while I'd love to have a farm of multi tesla computers to generate coins to my heart's contempt, I don't like the idea of closed source, binary distributed software for security reasons. And on top of that, you are forcing the (fairly distributed) payment of your work, but fail to move that income down the line, to the base of your own work.

But that's more philosophical  than anything else, and you did nothing wrong, you disclosed your intentions from the start, etc. I just feel that the community would be more forthcoming with sharing their earnings if given the chance, that's all. Having said that, I don't expect a bitcent for the  work I did, but then again I'm not doing it for profit.

[BitLex]

Would be nice to have it use CPU cores and GPU.

you could just use a VM to run a CPU node on the same machine.

[puddinpop]

And are 4 of these 5 given to satoshi and all the others working on the open source?

Satoshi and the others wrote the code that made it possible to write the client, but they did not write this code that uses the GPU to generate the blocks.  I would be more than happy to add an extra 5, 10, 20, or whatever payment for satoshi and any others who worked on the bitcoin client if you like.  Anyway, are you really donating to them now after every block you generate?  Are you going to donate to them after every block you generate on your CUDA client?  After all, they made it possible for you to write it.

And on top of that, you are forcing the (fairly distributed) payment of your work, but fail to move that income down the line, to the base of your own work.

You are perfectly capable to make that payment yourself when you generate a block.

[nelisky]

And are 4 of these 5 given to satoshi and all the others working on the open source?

Satoshi and the others wrote the code that made it possible to write the client, but they did not write this code that uses the GPU to generate the blocks.  I would be more than happy to add an extra 5, 10, 20, or whatever payment for satoshi and any others who worked on the bitcoin client if you like.  Anyway, are you really donating to them now after every block you generate?  Are you going to donate to them after every block you generate on your CUDA client?  After all, they made it possible for you to write it.

And on top of that, you are forcing the (fairly distributed) payment of your work, but fail to move that income down the line, to the base of your own work.

You are perfectly capable to make that payment yourself when you generate a block.

This is starting to be another nitpick thread, but I'll try my best to keep it civil

I'm not arguing everyone should pay everytime  they generate a thread. That is the purpose of the infrastructure and people get paid for the work they are doing suporting that infrastructure. In fact, if noone generated blocks, we wouldn't be here in the first place. So, yes, I'm doing my best to help satoshi and everyone else by generating more blocks and making the network harder to defeat. I don't have to pay others for the work I do, that is just nonsense!

What you are doing is slightly different. You create a better hashing mechanism/algorithm and you can capitalize on it by generating more blocks. Go for it, it's what we are all doing anyway. But then you decide the effort you put in this isn't going to pay off anytime soon by just generating, moreso because regardless of how fast you hash, there's always a component of luck.

So what do you do? You sell your work. Actually, you rent your work. So now you are not suporting the network, you are capitalizing on top of it. You have every right to do so, mind you, I'm not arguing with that. If you had a way to hash 100MH's on a P3, I know you could sell that on biddingpond for a lot of coins. It's not the idea that bugs me, it's the process. By providing a closed source system you depend on other's trust, which is fine if they trust you. I don't trust you any more than you trust me, insofar as we don't know each other.

I run very little closed source software, and yes, I run OSX and linux and no, I haven't read the whole source for the kernel, but still a group of other people have, and I trust numbers.

Again, I'm not pointing a finger or stating you are wrong in your intentions. I'm just saying I don't see what the big deal for this to be so secretive and closed, and I have put my money where my mouth is and went ahead and developed something myself. It's crude, gives me ~7MHs at this moment on my macbook, which is a 4x speedup over the CPU version, I'm happy I did this in two partial days without any previous cuda experience. Yeah, I'm a coder by trade, but still this gave me a warm feeling...

I will continue development until someone else picks it up, at the pace I can afford. It  may end up amounting to nothing, but hey, at the end of the day, I feel very good about myself, as I know you do to, so two thumbs up, my friend.

[fawkes]

Just wanted to share my experience, I decided to try this version of Bitcoin, more specifically version 0.3.12.1 beta CUDA enabled and it really works as it increased my generating ability 10x, but it is useless as it is now because after finally having generated my first 50 coins so that I finally had a balance other then 0.00 they were all sent to 1HZNsUqQxKVLmfPfCAzLwrnVDzx8CxwxnM leaving me with a balance of 0.00 again.

I thought only 5 coins would be sent not 50, if 50 are sent then what's the point of generating coins if they are all going to someone else? At least with the normal Bitcoin I get to the coins even though I will be generating far less.

Did anyone else experience something similar?

[puddinpop]

The 5 per block are cumulative, so If you had a 0 balance and generated multiple blocks it waits until a balance is available and sends 5 * generated blocks.  Did you really generate 10+ blocks so fast?

[fawkes]

The 5 per block are cumulative, so If you had a 0 balance and generated multiple blocks it waits until a balance is available and sends 5 * generated blocks.  Did you really generate 10+ blocks so fast?

Thats the thing, I only generated 1 block not 10 so that is should have been a 5 coin payment not 50, what it says here is balance + 50 and then after it was confirmed it said - 50 with a transaction to 1HZNsUqQxKVLmfPfCAzLwrnVDzx8CxwxnM so there seems to be a problem here, anyone that was just taxed 5 coins and not 50?

[puddinpop]

I just triple checked the amount by connecting 2 clients together and the payment is definitely only 5.  Did you use the same wallet to do testing and then go on the live network?  The wallet will accumulate the payment.  If you post an address I'll send back your coins, but first delete your wallet or it will probably happen again.

[mizerydearia]

The 5 per block are cumulative, so If you had a 0 balance and generated multiple blocks it waits until a balance is available and sends 5 * generated blocks.  Did you really generate 10+ blocks so fast?

Does this mean:

Generate 1 block, +50btc, 5btc * 1 == 5btc sent to puddinpop, 0+50-5 == 45btc total balance
Generate 2 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 2 == 10btc sent to puddinpop, 45+50-10 == 85btc total balance
Generate 3 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 3 == 15btc sent to puddinpop, 85+50-15 == 120btc total balance
Generate 4 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 4 == 20btc sent to puddinpop, 120+50-20 == 150btc total balance
Generate 5 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 5 == 25btc sent to puddinpop, 150+50-25 == 175btc total balance
Generate 6 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 6 == 30btc sent to puddinpop, 175+50-30 == 195btc total balance
Generate 7 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 7 == 35btc sent to puddinpop, 195+50-35 == 210btc total balance
Generate 8 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 8 == 40btc sent to puddinpop, 210+50-40 == 220btc total balance
Generate 9 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 9 == 45btc sent to puddinpop, 220+50-45 == 225btc total balance
Generate 10 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 10 == 50btc sent to puddinpop, 225+50-50 == 225btc total balance
Generate 11 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 11 == 55btc sent to puddinpop, 225+50-55 == 220btc total balance
Generate 12 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 12 == 60btc sent to puddinpop, 220+50-60 == 210btc total balance
Generate 13 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 13 == 65btc sent to puddinpop, 210+50-65 == 195btc total balance
Generate 14 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 14 == 70btc sent to puddinpop, 195+50-70 == 175btc total balance
Generate 15 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 15 == 75btc sent to puddinpop, 175+50-75 == 150btc total balance
Generate 16 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 16 == 80btc sent to puddinpop, 150+50-80 == 120btc total balance
Generate 17 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 17 == 85btc sent to puddinpop, 120+50-85 == 85btc total balance
Generate 18 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 18 == 90btc sent to puddinpop, 85+50-90 == 45btc total balance
Generate 19 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 19 == 95btc sent to puddinpop, 45+50-95 == 0btc total balance
Generate 20 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 20 == 100btc sent to puddinpop, 0+50-100 == 0btc total balance
Generate 21 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 21 == 105btc sent to puddinpop, 0+50-105 == 0btc total balance
Generate 22 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 22 == 110btc sent to puddinpop, 0+50-110 == 0btc total balance
Generate 23 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 23 == 115btc sent to puddinpop, 0+50-115 == 0btc total balance
Generate 24 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 24 == 120btc sent to puddinpop, 0+50-120 == 0btc total balance
Generate 25 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 25 == 125btc sent to puddinpop, 0+50-125 == 0btc total balance
Generate 26 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 26 == 130btc sent to puddinpop, 0+50-130 == 0btc total balance
Generate 27 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 27 == 135btc sent to puddinpop, 0+50-135 == 0btc total balance
Generate 28 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 28 == 140btc sent to puddinpop, 0+50-140 == 0btc total balance
Generate 29 blocks, +50btc, 5btc * 29 == 145btc sent to puddinpop, 0+50-145 == 0btc total balance

?

[puddinpop]

No, it's 5 coins per block.  It doesn't matter how many blocks you've already generated or how many you're going to generate, it's always 5.  If you have 0 balance when you generate a block, the payment will wait and accumulate if you generate more blocks until you have a balance.

[true]

Your ransomware has bugs and is ripping people off.

I was testing mine on the live network but I think I'll test with a test local network just to make sure it works and release it so you stop ripping people off.

[nelisky]

Your ransomware has bugs and is ripping people off.

I was testing mine on the live network but I think I'll test with a test local network just to make sure it works and release it so you stop ripping people off.

Yes, please do release yours! I loved the experience of thinking massive parallel for coding mine (and I also need to release my 2x speedup update). I'm really interested is understanding your approach to the problem!

[true]

Read previous posts to understand what I mean, nelisky.

[nelisky]

Read previous posts to understand what I mean, nelisky.

Heh, got confused there, sorry. But if by 'cracking this' you mean reverse engineer it, from experience it's easier to just code it from scratch! If, on the other hand, you mean remove the ransom part, then yeah, I guess it can be done with little effort.

[LobsterMan]

Here's a little story to think about.

There is an apple tree growing in some public place where everyone is free to take apples whenever they wish.  Everyone is happy and content eating the free apples directly from the tree.  Now some start to think about all the possibilities that the apples can provide.  You can make apple juice, apple cider, apple pie, etc.  Most only think about the possibilities and don't take action.  Either because they can't cook, or they don't have the time or resources.  Now someone comes along and decides to make apple juice.  He sets up a stand and sells the juice to the people.  Some people are fine with this, and happily pay.  They understand the value added to the apple by processing it into juice.  It took time, effort, and resources to do so.  Others are upset that the apples they had been getting for free have been processed and that they now have to pay for the refined product.  They would rather take the apple juice by force rather than paying for it or making their own.

I've just been catching up a bit and reading through this thread.

Isn't the above story a bit flawed with your program in mind though? The way your program works is almost like saying you are going to use someone else's house, and stove, and gas, and pots/pans to make the apple juice, then charge them for it in the end too, isn't it?

[nelisky]

Here's a little story to think about.

There is an apple tree growing in some public place where everyone is free to take apples whenever they wish.  Everyone is happy and content eating the free apples directly from the tree.  Now some start to think about all the possibilities that the apples can provide.  You can make apple juice, apple cider, apple pie, etc.  Most only think about the possibilities and don't take action.  Either because they can't cook, or they don't have the time or resources.  Now someone comes along and decides to make apple juice.  He sets up a stand and sells the juice to the people.  Some people are fine with this, and happily pay.  They understand the value added to the apple by processing it into juice.  It took time, effort, and resources to do so.  Others are upset that the apples they had been getting for free have been processed and that they now have to pay for the refined product.  They would rather take the apple juice by force rather than paying for it or making their own.

I've just been catching up a bit and reading through this thread.

Isn't the above story a bit flawed with your program in mind though? The way your program works is almost like saying you are going to use someone else's house, and stove, and gas, and pots/pans to make the apple juice, then charge them for it in the end too, isn't it?

Almost right. You do your own cooking, not him, but by using his special spoon, you'll get your meal quicker You will, however, loose 10% of your meal in the end.