Generating Bitcoins with your video card (OpenCL/CUDA)

[puddinpop]

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.

So you use satoshi's pots and pans and my special spoon to make the whole thing go quicker.  Everyone is free to create their own special spoon, but not too many will do such a thing.  If you want to use my special spoon, you have to give me a portion of what you create.  In a given amount of time, however, using the special spoon will net you more than if you didn't use it.

[mizerydearia]

What if you were to rely on the special spoon for so many years and then you realized that you couldn't live without that special spoon and are locked in?  e.g. similar to ms windows vendor lock-in kinda

[nelisky]

But you know what?

"There is no spoon..."

Hah!

[Immanuel]

But you know what?

"There is no spoon..."

Hah!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzm8kTIj_0M

For those who don't understand.

[puddinpop]

Here's the latest binary based on SVN 153.  It includes bitcoind and has an added command line option to squeeze out more hashes/s at the cost of a less responsive desktop.

See my signature for the latest download.

[Cheater]

So you use satoshi's pots and pans and my special spoon to make the whole thing go quicker.  Everyone is free to create their own special spoon, but not too many will do such a thing.  If you want to use my special spoon, you have to give me a portion of what you create.  In a given amount of time, however, using the special spoon will net you more than if you didn't use it.

But what about the people who would like to improve your special spoon?
I would very much like a Linux version, yet because you've closed your sauce (oh I'm punny today), I cannot improve it.

[mizerydearia]

Or how about a version for BeOS?  It's not dead yet!

[Ground Loop]

Failure on HP EliteBook 6930p w/ ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450.

BitcoinMinerGPU started
then the app fails with an error an exits.

Win7-64bit

[mizerydearia]

If I were puddinpop, I would release versions of my proprietary client that seem legitimate at first and really are, but gradually implement code to kind of taste what users are doing with my client and also of course monitor how much income I am receiving.  If I notice that I am receiving more and more income, at a point where there are hundreds, thousands even millions of users who have established trust into my product because it is so helpful to others to generate bitcoins, on my next update I would then proceed in secretly changing the 5% sent to me to 100% as well as add code to send to me ALL bitcoins left in each user's wallet and then suffer having a bad reputation at the expense of others as is furiously posted to the forums and users gradually discover my evil intent, but I will have already exchanged the BTC for another currency.  As far as I know, there is no illegality for doing this, because I haven't established any terms of service for my product.  Instead I simply released it on a forum without any related informations or anything.

[em3rgentOrdr]

If I were puddinpop, I would release versions of my proprietary client that seem legitimate at first and really are, but gradually implement code to kind of taste what users are doing with my client and also of course monitor how much income I am receiving.  If I notice that I am receiving more and more income, at a point where there are hundreds, thousands even millions of users who have established trust into my product because it is so helpful to others to generate bitcoins, on my next update I would then proceed in secretly changing the 5% sent to me to 100% as well as add code to send to me ALL bitcoins left in each user's wallet and then suffer having a bad reputation at the expense of others as is furiously posted to the forums and users gradually discover my evil intent, but I will have already exchanged the BTC for another currency.  As far as I know, there is no illegality for doing this, because I haven't established any terms of service for my product.  Instead I simply released it on a forum without any related informations or anything.

Don't give puddinpop any ideas!

But yes you make an excellent point: Gradually build up trust and then violate that trust for profit.  That's a common scheme used by scam-artists/politicians/criminals...

I don't like what puddinpop is doing...I hope someone releases an opensource version.  Does anyone know of any donation pools for generating and releasing an GPL opensource OpenCL/CUDA client?  If not we should start one.

[nelisky]

If I were puddinpop, I would release versions of my proprietary client that seem legitimate at first and really are, but gradually implement code to kind of taste what users are doing with my client and also of course monitor how much income I am receiving.  If I notice that I am receiving more and more income, at a point where there are hundreds, thousands even millions of users who have established trust into my product because it is so helpful to others to generate bitcoins, on my next update I would then proceed in secretly changing the 5% sent to me to 100% as well as add code to send to me ALL bitcoins left in each user's wallet and then suffer having a bad reputation at the expense of others as is furiously posted to the forums and users gradually discover my evil intent, but I will have already exchanged the BTC for another currency.  As far as I know, there is no illegality for doing this, because I haven't established any terms of service for my product.  Instead I simply released it on a forum without any related informations or anything.

Don't give puddinpop any ideas!

But yes you make an excellent point: Gradually build up trust and then violate that trust for profit.  That's a common scheme used by scam-artists/politicians/criminals...

I don't like what puddinpop is doing...I hope someone releases an opensource version.  Does anyone know of any donation pools for generating and releasing an GPL opensource OpenCL/CUDA client?  If not we should start one.

There are at least three other implementations around:
-artforz' but I'm guessing he's keeping his edge
-sgtstein hinted he was working on one too, and would release
-mine at http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1009.msg12334#msg12334 which I have a major update for being tested, currently giving me 6200khs on my laptop GPU alone.

I'd be willing to work harder on making this usable by other people without having to tweak too much code for some coins, sure. But frankly I see a handful of people complaining here about how puddinpop is closed, how it might be a scam, and that we need an alternative but, frankly, I've received zero feedback on the usefulness of my approach.
Oh, and keep in mind I'm releasing everything I do, but I'm only doing it on OSX 10.6 because that's the only cuda enabled gpu I have. Also, for all the ATI users out there, I'll try opencl soon, just don't know exactly when.

But I don't want to hijack puddinpop's thread, sorry for the shameless plug, if nothing else he did me a huge service by releasing his client close source, making me get my first cup of cuda, something I was meaning to do for a long time... I'll send him 5 coins for each block I generate with my client, if I ever do

[jgarzik]

There are at least three other implementations around:
-artforz' but I'm guessing he's keeping his edge
-sgtstein hinted he was working on one too, and would release
-mine at http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1009.msg12334#msg12334 which I have a major update for being tested, currently giving me 6200khs on my laptop GPU alone.

I would also count solar, who released MacOS binaries and a partial open source implementation, the SHA256 implementation in OpenCL:
http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/

[nelisky]

There are at least three other implementations around:
-artforz' but I'm guessing he's keeping his edge
-sgtstein hinted he was working on one too, and would release
-mine at http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1009.msg12334#msg12334 which I have a major update for being tested, currently giving me 6200khs on my laptop GPU alone.

I would also count solar, who released MacOS binaries and a partial open source implementation, the SHA256 implementation in OpenCL:
http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/

Funny I missed that, as I actually tried the client on OSX back in the days. So there are a bunch of alternatives, only nothing maintained or production ready. I could maintain such a thing, but right now I'm so mixed up into many things that I have to balance cost/benefit, but I'd gladly support (i.e. donate to) someone picking this up. If there are no takers I'll still continue development, but at a slow pace.

[puddinpop]

Failure on HP EliteBook 6930p w/ ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450.

BitcoinMinerGPU started
then the app fails with an error an exits.

Win7-64bit

My client is CUDA only for now.  Unless you have another CUDA device, it's not going to work on a Radeon.

[ciuciu]

Hi,
I used your client to generate a block. I did not clear my wallet so it sent 5.35 to your address instead of 5. I had to restart the client due to overheating and it sent again 5.35 to your address. Can you send back 5.70? I can send you a print screen.
Thank you.

Here's the latest binary based on SVN 153.  It includes bitcoind and has an added command line option to squeeze out more hashes/s at the cost of a less responsive desktop.

See my signature for the latest download.

[FreeMoney]

I think you guys should give the pudding berating a rest. He did some work and made an offer, that's all. Of course it would be nice to have it done for free, and I'm sure it's annoying redoing it, but he hasn't done anything bad at all. And there is no reason to think he's putting malicious code out there, and if you are worried, obviously you should just not use it.

[nelisky]

I think you guys should give the pudding berating a rest. He did some work and made an offer, that's all. Of course it would be nice to have it done for free, and I'm sure it's annoying redoing it, but he hasn't done anything bad at all. And there is no reason to think he's putting malicious code out there, and if you are worried, obviously you should just not use it.

Here, here. I can't say I don't understand his actions, I just wouldn't take that route personally. In any case, if you don't like/trust his offer, don't take it. You can always code it yourself to understand the effort involved.

Heck, you can actually use my code or one of the others to help you bootstrap things and I bet ya even so you'll start to appreciate the effort that needs to be put in doing this

[FreeMoney]

I think everyone working towards an open version is a great thing for sure. It has huge positive externalities that accrue to all of us, even if we don't ever use it. Bitcoin is not very secure when one programmer and 20 GPUs can double spend. Once there is efficient, open code it will take much much more power to corrupt the system.

[LZ]

Bitcoin 0.3.12 with CUDA support without ransomware: download.
It is just puddinpop's build with the broken SendMoney() function.
So if you want to send bitcoins, you should use satoshi's version.
Do you need puddinpop's build with SendMoney()? And may be his
CUDA enabled build of Bitcoin's daemon? But without ransomware!
Donations are welcome: 1B7qVBeKZoi1g6nCbMiFT5JkfNB2SKGinc...

Original puddinpop's deUPXed bitcoin.exe file:

Code:

042360: 1C F3 FF FF 83 C4 20 84 C0 0F 84 0E 01 00 00 80

My cracked version:

Code:

042360: 1C F3 FF FF 83 C4 20 A8 00 0F 84 38 02 00 00 80

P.S. Use 7-Zip with LZMA2 support to decompress archive: get it.

[puddinpop]

Or everyone could do the obvious thing and donate to me to open source it.  Why do you find my work so worthwhile to crack, yet you won't help the community by donating to open source it?  You do realize that you can crack it all you want, but without the source code you'll get stuck with an outdated client very fast.  I'm on the verge of releasing an OpenCL enabled build as well.  Do you really want to be the person who changed my mind about releasing it and providing enhancements to the CUDA version?  I'm sure the community will let you know how they feel about this.