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adam3us (OP)
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Hi Digging myself out of the newbie jail. But a real question - why is difficulty not expressed in bits? With hashcash I always used eg 20bits. I think bitcoin is currently at 52. As bitcoin mining is hashcash mining plus an extension to allow fractional bits (rather than to find k 0 bits, to find a number < 2^k where can be fractional). But its hard to be 100% certain if I even correctly converted that because this page is unnecessarily complex for a very simple actual problem: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficultyand bits are very easy to read. If one looks at the hash output in hex just multiply the leading 0s by 4 (and the next nibble figure out if it is >7 = 4 bits, > 3 = 3 bits, > 1 = 2 bits and 1 = 1 bit (and obviously 0 would be another leading 0). QED trivial, human comprehensible difficulty that can be handchecked. That was part of the design aim for hashcash to simplify the computational, programming and human verification. Adam |
hashcash, committed transactions, homomorphic values, blind kdf; researching decentralization, scalability and fungibility/anonymity
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Bitcoin mining is now a specialized and very risky industry, just like gold mining. Amateur miners are unlikely to make much money, and may even lose money. Bitcoin is much more than just mining, though!
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NewAgeCoins
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April 17, 2013, 02:47:48 PM |
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I think the newbie area is the wrong place to post that  |
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daemol
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April 17, 2013, 03:25:21 PM |
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Newbies are restricted to this section only  |
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Fiyasko
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Okey Dokey Lokey
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April 17, 2013, 03:31:53 PM |
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Well, difficulty is a real number, its not a referance number
I fully agree that we need a more "human interpretable" form of a difficulty stat, Telling someone that the difficulty is 7,673,000 and that its going to rise up around by 1-2million more Really doesnt mean much to them, its just confusing to hear that "a bitcoin is now 7673000x harder to get than it was when it was first released" it really doesnt tell us much.
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adam3us (OP)
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April 17, 2013, 04:10:58 PM |
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Well, difficulty is a real number, its not a referance number
I fully agree that we need a more "human interpretable" form of a difficulty stat, Telling someone that the difficulty is 7,673,000 and that its going to rise up around by 1-2million more Really doesnt mean much to them, its just confusing to hear that "a bitcoin is now 7673000x harder to get than it was when it was first released" it really doesnt tell us much.
Right thats approximately meaningless. Now the original or minimal difficulty is 2^32 so 7,673,000 x 2^32 is approx 2^55. How easy is that in comparison because 7,673,000 ~ 2^23. (I guess I must've mistranslated it before 55 not 52 bits) And when you see a bitcoin in hex (like with hashcash because that is what the coin is) you can visually *see* those 55 bits. This is the latest hash from the block explorer: http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000000000e3d3268e05a9901759c1452590d0838a80aeb8abaea59f1e9fand bingo I can count 0s (14 of them) multiply by 4 (bits per hex nibble) and I know that is a 56bit hashcash collision. (You get lucky and an extra 1 bit half the time, 2 bits 1/2 time etc). Adam |
hashcash, committed transactions, homomorphic values, blind kdf; researching decentralization, scalability and fungibility/anonymity
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adam3us (OP)
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I think the newbie area is the wrong place to post that Indeed and being the person who invented the bitcoin mining function I was mildly irritated to be dumped in a newbie section. I was enjoying USENET flame wars and newbie jokes probably before the average participant of this forum was born (No slight to other internet-time geriatrics like myself on here). Anyway rather than post hello and following up to myself 5x I thought I'd say something that was on my mind as irritating about the bitcoin wiki explanation of various things. I can always re-post it later on. Adam ps thanks for the op for another reply  |
hashcash, committed transactions, homomorphic values, blind kdf; researching decentralization, scalability and fungibility/anonymity
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memvola
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April 18, 2013, 03:43:51 PM |
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why is difficulty not expressed in bits?
Naive question: Wouldn't that mean that difficulty can only be halved or doubled at a time? That's bit of a problem. Maybe they could be expressed in 1/n 2 bits. That wouldn't make it any more comprehensible of course, but would help with the problem of difficulty adjustments getting more precise as difficulty increases. (btw, mods can move newbie discussions to proper forums on demand) |
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NewAgeCoins
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April 18, 2013, 08:13:43 PM |
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Anyway rather than post hello and following up to myself 5x I thought I'd say something that was on my mind as irritating about the bitcoin wiki explanation of various things. I can always re-post it later on.
I hope you get a chance to post that question here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=6.0I'm afraid you won't get an answer from Satoshi But I'd be curious what Gavin, Jeff Garzik, etc say. |
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bradford
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April 18, 2013, 08:28:27 PM |
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I'm just jumping in with my naive opinion, so please criticize as necessary.
Why not reference difficulty in terms of number of leading zeroes for the target hash?
For instance "our difficulty level is at 14 leading zeroes of precision"
I realize that the jump from each zero to the next is not linear, but wouldn't it be useful for describing "epochs" of difficulty?
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