[BTE] The Bytecoin Information Thread

[Sotashi_Nokamato]

{"block":"58137"} 

[Sotashi_Nokamato]

This coins is 5 years old!

Code:

                   |_|  /| |_)|_)\_/
                   | | /-| |  |   /
               _     _ ___     _
              |_) | |_) |  |_|| \  /| \_/
              |_) | | \ |  | ||_/ /-|  /

                               .--------.
                             .: : :  :___`.
                           .'!!:::::  \\_\ `.
                      : . /%O!!::::::::\\_\. \
                     [""]/%%O!!:::::::::  : . \
                     |  |%%OO!!::::::::::: : . |
                     |  |%%OO!!:::::::::::::  :|
                     |  |%%OO!!!::::::::::::: :|
            :       .'--`.%%OO!!!:::::::::::: :|
          : .:     /`.__.'\%%OO!!!::::::::::::/
         :    .   /        \%OO!!!!::::::::::/
        ,-'``'-. ;          ;%%OO!!!!!!:::::'
        |`-..-'| |   ,--.   |`%%%OO!!!!!!:'
        | .   :| |_.','`.`._|  `%%%OO!%%'
        | . :  | |--'    `--|    `%%%%'
        |`-..-'| ||   | | | |     /__\`-.
        \::::::/ ||)|/|)|)|\|           /
---------`::::'--|._ ~**~ _.|----------( -----------------------
           )(    |  `-..-'  |           \    ______
           )(    |          |,--.       ____/ /  /\\ ,-._.-'
        ,-')('-. |          |\`;/   .-()___  :  |`.!,-'`'/`-._
       (  '  `  )`-._    _.-'|;,|    `-,    \_\__\`,-'>-.,-._
        `-....-'     ````    `--'      `-._       (`- `-._`-.   hjw

[ProfMac]

I have the opinion that 3 factors should go into the difficulty adjustment.
This opinion is captured in new technology I am calling Hard Turtle.


1.  The long term mining rate of the coin.

• 600 sec / block since genesis
• adjust the difficulty_0 according to this factor

2.  The interval mining rate of the coin.  This is the standard difficulty adjustment after 2016 blocks, difficulty or difficulty_1.
3.  The time since MedianPrevTime. 

• This should also be 600 sec/block. 
• The value of those difficulty increases (will be) in a calculated table, and called difficulty_2.
• The actual behavior is described very well by a Poisson distribution.  See the link several posts above.
• This can be control without an audit trail by changing the target hash reported in getminingtemplate
• The value of those difficulty increases (will be) in a calculated table, and called difficulty_2.

4.  The new difficulty will be the cube root of difficulty_0 * difficulty_1 * difficulty_2. 

• This is easy to calculate using nBits.
• After calculation, it will be clipped to a factor of 4x change, as is the current practice.

5.  These changes will dovetail very nicely with a distributed mining pool. 

• The difficulty items are nearing the end of development and testing.
• The mining pool has some development work.

6.  The old client will work with these changes for a few Intervals (epochs of 2016 blocks) but as the difficulty starts to steady out, the nBits numbers will eventually differ and cause a hard fork.

7.  I am making the hard fork stronger, and repairing the entire blockchain. 

• This will result in the same transactions as before, but a blockchain with a difficulty near 1.
• It will take fewer hashes to mine 58,000 blocks at difficulty 1 than 300 blocks at difficulty 1,000,000.
• No data will be lost.
• Timestamps will be very similar.
• It took a devil of a long time to work out the logic of mining blocs nunc pro tunc.
• The blockchain repair will occur with a client that also supports the mining pool.  Alternate blocks will generate new rewards, so it will be earn as you repair.

8.  It turns out, I can include a coinbase block for a bitcoin block as well, while I am doing the repair.  Go to the survey a few postings above, and include any bitcoin address that you have been paid to in a coinbase block :-).

[movellan]

Prof, appreciate all the hard work you are putting into BTE, but I am dead set against any fork. Ahmed Bodi tried to go that that route so he could gain control of mining. Please explain further. TIA.

[Sotashi_Nokamato]

The difficulty of this coin is LOW right now. All that is needed now is to feed to "Locust" and let them skyrocket tje current difficulty.

[ProfMac]

Prof, appreciate all the hard work you are putting into BTE, but I am dead set against any fork. Ahmed Bodi tried to go that that route so he could gain control of mining. Please explain further. TIA.

I think it is prudent to be skeptical of all things blockchain.

Having said that, I notice these things:

The coin was strip-mined.
It was stagnant for a really long time.
Without change, it remains vulnerable to a strip-mining attack when we revive it.
I own several existing coins.  The blockchain needs to be viable for them to have value.
This is a serious matter.  A coin that does not produce blocks for 18 months is effectively dead.

I have thought since 2014 about how to protect against strip mining.  I am convinced I have a solution, and I have been coding with strong focus and watching the calendar.  I want my solution to work well enough when I release it, and I don't want to release enough information that someone can scoop me with an implementation that goes in a direction that is philosophically incompatible to me.  That is a delicate dance in cryptocoin country.

So I am releasing my ideas fairly slowly, when the horizon to release an implementation is within view.  I think that, any time now, I can make a code release to GitHub and things will be transparent.  Then the community can make an informed decision.  A bit of my work is on gitgub now, including the mechanism to build a VM to compile the code in, a mechanism to report the SHA-256 of the resulting binaries for crowd-sourced validation.  I do need to clean up the VM generation a bit to solve the "genesis VM" problem.  I was working on that when PersonalLife took some attention, and no one has seemed very interested, so it is on the ToDo list starved for attention.

What I can say for now is that there is a live testing block chain at bte.vima.austin.tx.us:26333  As detailed in an earlier post, the existing client can download this blockchain.  N.B. "As detailed in an earlier post."  As a testing block chain, it has warts and knotholes and changes whimsically.  As soon as I get the code located at https://github.com/a-mcintosh/expt-block1 back ported into the 0.8.1 BTE client's mining code and supported in the getblocktemplate command I will take a few day breather.  I may make a code release then, or I may decide to get the distributed mining pool working first.  LOL.  My estimate for that is "last month."

[ProfMac]

The difficulty of this coin is LOW right now. All that is needed now is to feed to "Locust" and let them skyrocket tje current difficulty.

Somewhere in storage, I have an Avalon 2, 83 GH/s.  We are already using air conditioning in Austin.  I can rent hashes, if I run a stratum pool.  I figured the cost to mine to the next difficulty change, and decided to write code to fix the problem once and for all instead.

[movellan]

Prof, I haven't coded since Turbo Pascal days and am not likely to start seriously at this stage. I have a basic understanding of what you are trying to do; I have coins from the earlier days also. Two issues come to mind:

1)  Considering the chaos that forking has wrought on the BTC community (especially BCH), I am leery of any basic changes in BTE coding since it's a straight clone of BTC. Someone is always going to take advantage of such changes to cash in for himself. Witness the BCH decable.

2) If you do post your proposed code changes to Github, how many users will it take to from a consensus? What happens to those who decline to adopt the changes? If they continue to use the original .08.1 software, will they be eventually locked out of the blockchain as the new chain adoption increases?

BTW, do you think I should continue mining? I would have commenced mining much earlier, but I could not get a connection to any peers. My 2 U3's seem to be picking up 2-3 blocks a day. Anyone object to this?

[movellan]

Yeah, sure. A fat lot of good that will do. It will be like 2013 and Ahmed Bodi hitting the BTE blockchain with a multi-terrahash ASIC, gobbling up all the blocks until the network difficulity went sky high, and then left leaving the rest of miners to fend for themselves.  See his posts from 2013 in this thread.

The difficulty of this coin is LOW right now. All that is needed now is to feed to "Locust" and let them skyrocket tje current difficulty.

[ProfMac]

Prof, I haven't coded since Turbo Pascal days and am not likely to start seriously at this stage. I have a basic understanding of what you are trying to do; I have coins from the earlier days also. Two issues come to mind:

1)  Considering the chaos that forking has wrought on the BTC community (especially BCH), I am leery of any basic changes in BTE coding since it's a straight clone of BTC. Someone is always going to take advantage of such changes to cash in for himself. Witness the BCH decable.

2) If you do post your proposed code changes to Github, how many users will it take to from a consensus? What happens to those who decline to adopt the changes? If they continue to use the original .08.1 software, will they be eventually locked out of the blockchain as the new chain adoption increases?

BTW, do you think I should continue mining? I would have commenced mining much earlier, but I could not get a connection to any peers. My 2 U3's seem to be picking up 2-3 blocks a day. Anyone object to this?

(Usually I edit carefully.  "She" doesn't like me, and I went and had beer.  Last time someone posted under those conditions, we got the term "HODL")

I wish I could see the future for answers.

I have a lot of coins, and it is strongly in my interest for them to have value.  Today, I think that they don't.

I think the choice is between disruptive change, and a chain that was stagnant for almost 18 months and will be strip-mined again when profitable.  That is a hard choice, but I don't see a different way to slice it.

On the code changes I am driven by only a few things.  1)  I don't like special cases, 2)  It takes many fewer hashes to repair the blockchain at about difficulty 1 than to finish the current and next interval to get the difficulty low.  I figured it would take maybe $500 of electricity or hash rental to get the difficulty low again.  I also want to give a block reward to the current miners as they mine the repair.  This was a bit tricky to detail out.

My plan is to offer a fork and honestly list what I think the advantages are.  Where-ever people put their hashes, that is where the future goes.  I am deliberately indifferent as to which is chosen, keep in mind that I am hosting and facilitating a seed node on the legacy situation.

I will work strongly to what I think is a best solution, but it is always the choice of others to use it, or to stay with the strip-mined chain.

The blunt truth is that the current client is vulnerable to strip-mining.  While there may be a way to remove that vulnerability and keep total compatibility for the foreseeable future, I don't know that solution after 4 years of thinking.  So I am working on a minimal change version.  I have a lot of ideas for "improvements" but as an experienced person I resist their temptation.  I don't know what will happen during field test.  That is a scary time for a programmer.  All I can do is make a strong effort and see what happens.

I do think that all the alt-coins that rely on the original Satoshi client are vulnerable to strip mining.  I think this is important technology to develop, whether the BTE group itself adopts it or not, and whether the core developers like it or not.

I do plan to pursue this as long as I think it is technically viable, in venues including and also other than the BTE group.  I will make announcements 1st in the BTE group while they are still open to my changes.

As to whether you should keep mining.  I can be accused of a conflict of interest if I give a crisp answer to that.  I also don't really know.  I could have a heart attack or be shot by a jealous boyfriend tomorrow, and you would wish you had kept mining.  The minute I release my software I hope you will mine some on the repaired blockchain, but otherwise I think I need to remain silent.

Please raise all the objections that you can think of.  I am working in a bubble, and I may have missed something important and obvious.

[movellan]

I have a spare machine that never had a BTE node running. I can set it up with a fresh node, get it synced, and when it comes time to try your code fix, I'll change it over and see how it goes. I can switch mining to this new node for testing when you get ready. Thus if any problems arise with the fork, my original setup remains untouched.

Again I ask if my mining is causing any problems with your efforts? I'll hold off for a while if it would be helpful. TIA.

[dbstmddhks]

Bytecoin is a crypto currency based on a peer-to-peer network. Its launch took place on July 4, 2012. Since then, its price is slowly but surely growing, which makes it a successful competitor to other leading and widely used digital coins, such as Bitcoin and Etherium. Its authors decided to focus on creating a safer and anonymous crypto currency than bitcoin. The result is a coin that gives users an increased level of confidentiality. This is achieved through the mechanism of entangling the addresses of senders and recipients of funds.

[Sotashi_Nokamato]

Bytecoin is a crypto currency based on a peer-to-peer network. Its launch took place on July 4, 2012. Since then, its price is slowly but surely growing, which makes it a successful competitor to other leading and widely used digital coins, such as Bitcoin and Etherium. Its authors decided to focus on creating a safer and anonymous crypto currency than bitcoin. The result is a coin that gives users an increased level of confidentiality. This is achieved through the mechanism of entangling the addresses of senders and recipients of funds.

You are confusing coins. Read the first page of this thread for clarification.

[ProfMac]

I have a spare machine that never had a BTE node running. I can set it up with a fresh node, get it synced, and when it comes time to try your code fix, I'll change it over and see how it goes. I can switch mining to this new node for testing when you get ready. Thus if any problems arise with the fork, my original setup remains untouched.

Again I ask if my mining is causing any problems with your efforts? I'll hold off for a while if it would be helpful. TIA.

The mining does not cause problems.  Please use your best judgement.

Do you have a Linux environment available?

[ProfMac]

Bytecoin is a crypto currency based on a peer-to-peer network. Its launch took place on July 4, 2012. Since then, its price is slowly but surely growing, which makes it a successful competitor to other leading and widely used digital coins, such as Bitcoin and Etherium. Its authors decided to focus on creating a safer and anonymous crypto currency than bitcoin. The result is a coin that gives users an increased level of confidentiality. This is achieved through the mechanism of entangling the addresses of senders and recipients of funds.

You are almost certainly speaking of BCN, not BTE.

Can you show any public evidence that it existed before April 1, 2013?  Private notes released afterward do not count.

[ProfMac]

Bytecoin is a crypto currency based on a peer-to-peer network. Its launch took place on July 4, 2012. Since then, its price is slowly but surely growing, which makes it a successful competitor to other leading and widely used digital coins, such as Bitcoin and Etherium. Its authors decided to focus on creating a safer and anonymous crypto currency than bitcoin. The result is a coin that gives users an increased level of confidentiality. This is achieved through the mechanism of entangling the addresses of senders and recipients of funds.

You are confusing coins. Read the first page of this thread for clarification.

I have thought of several re-branding ideas.  Here is one now.  I can't get an image link to show the image in the posting.  Maybe there is some rule my image breaks, but anyway here is a link.

The ticker symbol would be IOU

https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipP4Xi3AYB03j8XogRmoI8E4znL_7iDbNbabIMhl/photo/AF1QipNMjf97kuW3ps5zTF-4J6r-dwWsQVB32PEh4Fww


I made a Linux binary in mid 2017, and it is what you connect to when you reach my seed node.  It is totally legacy BTE technology, with the new artwork and name included, and instead of presenting BTE, mBTE, μBTE as display units, it presents kIOU, IOU, and mIOU.  

There are a couple of justifications for the larger numbers.
1.  As the same technology as Bitcoin, it should have the same value at equilibrium.  Let's set that expectation.
2.  Bitcoin was at about USD 1,000 / BTC 1 when I compiled the binary.  So it presented as 1 IOU = 1 USD.
3.  This is all experimental changes in my lab, "thinking out loud" as it were.

It makes it look like you have 1,000x more.  "Mine goes to 11"  I also made a version of a client that had a "g_Au" presentation option.  That implies all sorts of things, but I am just playing with ideas, not seriously advocating anything at the moment.

[7Sage]

server=1
rpcuser=<username>
rpcpassword=<password>
rpctimeout=30
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
rpcport=6332
seednode=seed.bte.vima.austin.tx.us

trying connection 86.25.234.163:6333 lastseen=29691.3hrs
trying connection 95.180.104.243:6333 lastseen=23063.8hrs
trying connection 104.200.154.16:6333 lastseen=3220.1hrs
Flushed 9999 addresses to peers.dat  101ms
trying connection 201.153.167.64:6333 lastseen=1733.5hrs
trying connection 100.70.104.230:6333 lastseen=4840.1hrs

[ProfMac]

server=1
rpcuser=<username>
rpcpassword=<password>
rpctimeout=30
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
rpcport=6332
seednode=seed.bte.vima.austin.tx.us

trying connection 86.25.234.163:6333 lastseen=29691.3hrs
trying connection 95.180.104.243:6333 lastseen=23063.8hrs
trying connection 104.200.154.16:6333 lastseen=3220.1hrs
Flushed 9999 addresses to peers.dat  101ms
trying connection 201.153.167.64:6333 lastseen=1733.5hrs
trying connection 100.70.104.230:6333 lastseen=4840.1hrs

I checked my debug.log just now.  I have 29 addresses that I am sending out.

Your 9,999 addresses might be from an earlier version of peers.dat,
Another node might have handed them to you.

I recommend adding the following to your bytecoin.conf file:

logtimestamps=1


and renaming your peers.dat file, perhaps to peers-1522685035-124.dat or some other equally unique name, then restart your client and see who you are getting these stale peers from.

[movellan]

Nothing at the moment. Dabbled with Ubuntu a few years back (one of my sons does medical work and he uses it a lot).

I have a spare machine that never had a BTE node running. I can set it up with a fresh node, get it synced, and when it comes time to try your code fix, I'll change it over and see how it goes. I can switch mining to this new node for testing when you get ready. Thus if any problems arise with the fork, my original setup remains untouched.

Again I ask if my mining is causing any problems with your efforts? I'll hold off for a while if it would be helpful. TIA.

The mining does not cause problems.  Please use your best judgement.

Do you have a Linux environment available?

[movellan]

Not in favor of re-naming. Ignore the BS from the BCN crowd; their theft of the BTE name was just another attempt to get rich with a pre-mined launch. Let's stick with Bytecoin and BTE.

Bytecoin is a crypto currency based on a peer-to-peer network. Its launch took place on July 4, 2012. Since then, its price is slowly but surely growing, which makes it a successful competitor to other leading and widely used digital coins, such as Bitcoin and Etherium. Its authors decided to focus on creating a safer and anonymous crypto currency than bitcoin. The result is a coin that gives users an increased level of confidentiality. This is achieved through the mechanism of entangling the addresses of senders and recipients of funds.

You are confusing coins. Read the first page of this thread for clarification.

I have thought of several re-branding ideas.  Here is one now.  I can't get an image link to show the image in the posting.  Maybe there is some rule my image breaks, but anyway here is a link.

The ticker symbol would be IOU

https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipP4Xi3AYB03j8XogRmoI8E4znL_7iDbNbabIMhl/photo/AF1QipNMjf97kuW3ps5zTF-4J6r-dwWsQVB32PEh4Fww


I made a Linux binary in mid 2017, and it is what you connect to when you reach my seed node.  It is totally legacy BTE technology, with the new artwork and name included, and instead of presenting BTE, mBTE, μBTE as display units, it presents kIOU, IOU, and mIOU.  

There are a couple of justifications for the larger numbers.
1.  As the same technology as Bitcoin, it should have the same value at equilibrium.  Let's set that expectation.
2.  Bitcoin was at about USD 1,000 / BTC 1 when I compiled the binary.  So it presented as 1 IOU = 1 USD.
3.  This is all experimental changes in my lab, "thinking out loud" as it were.

It makes it look like you have 1,000x more.  "Mine goes to 11"  I also made a version of a client that had a "g_Au" presentation option.  That implies all sorts of things, but I am just playing with ideas, not seriously advocating anything at the moment.