Please run a full node

[AmDD]

I run a full node, multiple actually. My reasoning for this is I am not a programmer I also do not own a business that I can accept Bitcoin at. The only way I can do my part in this community is to buy/spend Bitcoin, which I do, try to explain the benifits of using Bitcoin, which I do, and run a full node. I also dont currently mine Bitcoin and havent for quite awhile. Running a full node really doesnt cost that much if you have the hardware laying around. I was given a few old dell desktops with Core2Duo CPUs. I upgraded the hard drives to 1TB for cheap and taa-daa!

If this is all I am able to do to help out, even if its only a small help, Im ok with the tiny cost of doing so.

[1715203331]

1715203331

[digaran]

Bull crap all of you, you tell us to run a full node so miners get fat faster? what is the reason for a person not mining to run a full node? if a miner wants the votes of nodes then he will run them by himself, Bitcoin is not peer to peer, who says that? if miners refuse to include our transactions we can't do jack by our so called full nodes.
People like Franky1 can diversify the network by the money they earn through covert asicboost mining.

Generally ASIC miners are hacking machines, I can't mine with CPU and GPU? so I need to buy ASIC from a private manufacturer which turns out to be worse than governments?
Joke is on you hackers, miner=node no miner node=fool
Any miner out there to include my 120sat/b transactions if I broadcast from my full node every time without exception? then I will run a full node.

[dinofelis]

I run a full node, multiple actually. My reasoning for this is I am not a programmer I also do not own a business that I can accept Bitcoin at. The only way I can do my part in this community is to buy/spend Bitcoin, which I do, try to explain the benifits of using Bitcoin, which I do, and run a full node. I also dont currently mine Bitcoin and havent for quite awhile. Running a full node really doesnt cost that much if you have the hardware laying around. I was given a few old dell desktops with Core2Duo CPUs. I upgraded the hard drives to 1TB for cheap and taa-daa!

If this is all I am able to do to help out, even if its only a small help, Im ok with the tiny cost of doing so.

This is probably a good reason to run a full node: to get a feeling of satisfaction of contributing "something" to this Great Network and sleep with the comforting thought of a deed well done.

[-ck]

There's really no point any more in trying to explain how mining works to you.

I did warn you 

[jonald_fyookball]

10 pools with each 10% of the hash power find, each individually, a single solution on average every 100 minutes (1 hour and 20 minutes).  

they dont
they find a solution in an average of 10 minutes..

SEPARATELY

their solution is only accepted every 10th time, due to the competition

being accepted as part of the chain.. is different than how long it takes them to make a solution.

learn the context

This is only true if you mean that : once the other miners are removed and the difficulty re-adjusts to the one miner/pool.... at THAT POINT, it would be every 10 minutes on average.

But sans difficulty adjustment, if you kill 9 out of 10 pools and have only 1 pool left, it would take 100 minutes, not 10.

Is that what you meant?

[Cranky4u]

I run a full node whenever my PC is on so I can solo-mine whilst playing games / photography / etc...

I am also on the hunt for old miners for an Aussie solar panel system I am putting in...if you want to help strengthen the network, consider all those old dust collecting miners you have and now think about donating some.

Details from my marketplace post...

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1907886.0
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Please consider supporting crytpocurrency security with active distributed hashing, not consolidated into a handful of big miners / pools. If you have any old ASIC miners of any type that are currently door stoppers / dust collectors, please consider donating the items to an Aussie for strengthening the networks.

I am an electrical engineer that is putting some of my crypto into a modest stand alone solar / wind system using salvaged parts;
1. ~480W of solar panel
2. MPPT regulator
3. 2 car batteries
4. 3 UPS
5. 10 year old motherboard with AMD dual core processor
6. 30GHs R-Box (SHA-256) consumes 30W
7. 5GHs Butterfly labs consumes 30W

With this set up, I can establish some stand-alone ASIC miners to help strengthen the networks.

I am on the look out for:
1. Old ASIC miners of any type

I have some spoondoolies to cover shipping costs....

[franky1]

This is only true if you mean that : once the other miners are removed and the difficulty re-adjusts to the one miner/pool.... at THAT POINT, it would be every 10 minutes on average.

But sans difficulty adjustment, if you kill 9 out of 10 pools and have only 1 pool left, it would take 100 minutes, not 10.

Is that what you meant?

no
the pool would make blocks on average of 10 minutes

[jonald_fyookball]

Sorry bud... Franky... that's not how it works at all!

Time most certainly does not reset after any block.
The chances of solving a block are exactly the same at any point in time.

It doesn't matter if you run 100 trillion hashes, your chance of solving the block is (for all intents and purposes), exactly the same as when you started hashing.

The 10 minute interval comes from the probability of the entire network hashrate solving a block, which can be expressed as a Poisson distribution.   If you take away most pools, your time interval goes up.

[dinofelis]

There's really no point any more in trying to explain how mining works to you.

I did warn you 

It seemed unrealistic.

[franky1]

The 10 minute interval comes from the probability of the entire network hashrate solving a block, which can be expressed as a Poisson distribution.   If you take away most pools, your time interval goes up.

lol
go check some stats, before making assumptions.


for instance. block 463505
how long did it take antpool to make their block knowing antpools previous block was 463503

i guarantee you it was not 30 minutes, based on dino's bad maths of counting blocks


hint..
will you start the count from 463504 when it added 463504 hash and started working on 463505..
or will you base it off of the last time antpool got listed at 463503

the time to make block 463505 is not based on the last time that same pool had a block in the chain..
but the time it took to create a block with the previous hash (463504) until it has a solution of 463505

again its not based on assuming
if in an hour antpool only shows 2 blocks in a chain of 6 that it can only make 2 blocks an hour... where you average it as 30mins
all that shows is that only 2 blocks beat the competition..
but separately could have made 6 blocks in the hour, but were just not quite quick enough to get listed.

as you can see by the orphan list.
it made a block 2 seconds after bitcoin.com.. but was simply seen as a runner up and not counted..

so again how long do you think it took antpool to make 463505
i guarantee you it was not 30 minutes, (which is based on dino's bad maths of counting blocks that got listed)
but IS about how long a pool actually gets a solution listed or not listed

TL:DR;
more blocks are made then you think... they are just not displayed.
if you could see all the blocks even the ones not displayed you would see things differently

lets word it a different way to end the debate
pools make blocks in an average ~10 minutes..

pools make SPENDABLE/publicly displayed blocks less often dependant on if the competition beats them

[Viper1]

I had no idea what you all were "arguing" about. So last night I went off and finally got around to educating myself on exactly how mining works in regards to difficulty, hash rate etc etc etc. And even I can see franky1 is completely wrong.

[franky1]

people need to actually run scenarios..

and not just do retroactive maths on only the results of winners..

look behind the winners and see the times of the undisplayed losers aswell to see the real times

[Viper1]

people need to actually run scenarios..

and not just do retroactive maths on only the results of winners..

look behind the winners and see the times of the undisplayed losers aswell to see the real times

Where is the data that shows that pool A found a block a couple seconds after pool B? I don't know much about this stuff but if it's so close all the time one would think there would be a hell of a lot of orphans happening. Would that then mean this isn't an accurate reflection of that? https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks Cause I'm only seeing 3 in the last month.

[dinofelis]

Absolutely. With the caveat that despite the misappropriation of the word, entities that do not mine are not 'nodes', by the original definition. That aside, you sum up pretty completely the reason that I run a fully-validating-wallet.

These are also the reasons why I run a full node, on a old core-duo PC in my basement, which I upgraded with a big hard disk, and at which I look once a month to see if it is still running.  The other reason is to study the system itself.  I actually don't use my full node as a wallet: I use a light wallet on another system, and I connect to my "empty" full node in those rare cases I use bitcoin to pay for something (once or twice a year, say).

[franky1]

people need to actually run scenarios..

and not just do retroactive maths on only the results of winners..

look behind the winners and see the times of the undisplayed losers aswell to see the real times

Where is the data that shows that pool A found a block a couple seconds after pool B? I don't know much about this stuff but if it's so close all the time one would think there would be a hell of a lot of orphans happening. Would that then mean this isn't an accurate reflection of that? https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks Cause I'm only seeing 3 in the last month.

https://blockchain.info/orphaned-blocks
465722
Timestamp    2017-05-10 08:19:11 Relayed By    Bixin
Timestamp    2017-05-10 08:19:10 Relayed By    GBMiners
1 second apart

464681
Timestamp    2017-05-03 18:55:39 Relayed By    ViaBTC
Timestamp    2017-05-03 18:55:46 Relayed By    BTC.com
7 seconds apart

464185    
Timestamp    2017-04-30 11:40:29 Relayed By    BitFury
Timestamp    2017-04-30 11:39:59 Relayed By    Bixin
30 seconds apart

463505    
Timestamp    2017-04-25 23:15:20 Relayed By    Bitcoin.com
Timestamp    2017-04-25 23:15:22 Relayed By    AntPool
2 seconds apart



imagine it this way knowing only one person can win... some STOP when they see a winner as there is no point wasting precious seconds.. and RESET and work on a new block.

this does not mean it takes them 30 minutes it just means that stopping the instant a winner crosses the line is good odds to stop and restart, rather than to continue for a few more seconds (1-30 seconds) in the narrow hope you are more valid than the fastest first.

there are many many layers of security, efficiencies, percentages, features at play. far more then dino is putting into context when he just counts how many "winning" blocks he sees. rather than how long it actually takes a pool to make a block win or lose.

there is a difference
again for emphasise
the number of blocks that win per hour vs how many blocks are created per hour

[dinofelis]

people need to actually run scenarios..

and not just do retroactive maths on only the results of winners..

look behind the winners and see the times of the undisplayed losers aswell to see the real times

Where is the data that shows that pool A found a block a couple seconds after pool B? I don't know much about this stuff but if it's so close all the time one would think there would be a hell of a lot of orphans happening. Would that then mean this isn't an accurate reflection of that? https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks Cause I'm only seeing 3 in the last month.

If ever franky1's view were right, we would have (N-1) orphans about every 10 minutes, where N is the number of competing pools.  After all, according to him, there were 10 runners, and only one won.  So the other 9 lost.  Each 10 minutes, we would have 9 orphans.
In reality, we have 2 orphans or so per week.

As I outlined elsewhere in this thread, orphaning comes about because of the network delays between mining pools, when a pool didn't see yet that a new block was won, continued mining on the old block, and happened to win exactly during that interval, that block - which will be rejected by the other miners because they had already received the new block.

The probability of that happening is equal to (window of network delay) / 10 minutes in a Poisson distribution with average time 10 minutes and small delta-t.

From the orphaning rate, one can estimate the average network delay between miners.  It is essentially given by 10 minutes, times the ratio of orphaned blocks over the number of blocks won in a given period, because "around each won block" there is this "window of orphaning" which is about the propagation delay (including checking of validity).

Roughly, if we have, say, 2 blocks orphaned per week, and in a week, about 1000 blocks are found, we have:

10 minutes * 2 / 1000 = 1.2 seconds.

From this, I can also conclude that miner pools are DIRECTLY connected, because they can hardly receive their blocks through random paths in the P2P network where each node checks the block as a whole, in such small times.

[dinofelis]

people need to actually run scenarios..

and not just do retroactive maths on only the results of winners..

look behind the winners and see the times of the undisplayed losers aswell to see the real times

Where is the data that shows that pool A found a block a couple seconds after pool B? I don't know much about this stuff but if it's so close all the time one would think there would be a hell of a lot of orphans happening. Would that then mean this isn't an accurate reflection of that? https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks Cause I'm only seeing 3 in the last month.

https://blockchain.info/orphaned-blocks
465722
Timestamp    2017-05-10 08:19:11 Relayed By    Bixin
Timestamp    2017-05-10 08:19:10 Relayed By    GBMiners
1 second apart

464681
Timestamp    2017-05-03 18:55:39 Relayed By    ViaBTC
Timestamp    2017-05-03 18:55:46 Relayed By    BTC.com
7 seconds apart

464185    
Timestamp    2017-04-30 11:40:29 Relayed By    BitFury
Timestamp    2017-04-30 11:39:59 Relayed By    Bixin
30 seconds apart

463505    
Timestamp    2017-04-25 23:15:20 Relayed By    Bitcoin.com
Timestamp    2017-04-25 23:15:22 Relayed By    AntPool
2 seconds apart



imagine it this way knowing only one person can win... some STOP when they see a winner as there is no point wasting precious seconds.. and RESET and work on a new block.

this does not mean it takes them 30 minutes it just means that stopping the instant a winner crosses the line its good odds to stop and restart, than it is to continue for a few more seconds (1-30 seconds) in the narrow hope your more valid than the fastest first.

You cannot even use the time stamps at seconds precision, because the lower bits of the time stamp are used as nonce.

Most of the orphaned blocks are in reality much closer in time - simply because if the window of "collision" were bigger, there would be much more of them.

What you do, is post selection bias, however.   ALL orphaned blocks will be close in time !  Otherwise, they wouldn't collide !  But that doesn't tell you anything about all the non-colliding blocks !

[franky1]

You cannot even use the time stamps at seconds precision, because the lower bits of the time stamp are used as nonce.

Most of the orphaned blocks are in reality much closer in time - simply because if the window of "collision" were bigger, there would be much more of them.

What you do, is post selection bias, however.   ALL orphaned blocks will be close in time !  Otherwise, they wouldn't collide !

what you ar not understanding is many more blocks are produced per hour then you think. some propagate and get displayed. some propagate but dont get displayed, some are solved locally but realise theres no point propagating them and some stop just short of getting a solution to save precious seconds that they could use making the next block

but either way you thinking antpool (using the examples above) averages a block every 30 minutes simply because you only publicly see 2 blocks in that hour. is FLAWED

you are not accounting for the blocks it SOLVED but didnt win.. or the blocks it didnt bother propogating. or the blocks it stopped just shy of solving to save time on the next round....

all you done is seen 2 blocks displayed and done 60mins/2 =30min average

[Viper1]

people need to actually run scenarios..

and not just do retroactive maths on only the results of winners..

look behind the winners and see the times of the undisplayed losers aswell to see the real times

Where is the data that shows that pool A found a block a couple seconds after pool B? I don't know much about this stuff but if it's so close all the time one would think there would be a hell of a lot of orphans happening. Would that then mean this isn't an accurate reflection of that? https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks Cause I'm only seeing 3 in the last month.

https://blockchain.info/orphaned-blocks
465722
Timestamp    2017-05-10 08:19:11 Relayed By    Bixin
Timestamp    2017-05-10 08:19:10 Relayed By    GBMiners
1 second apart

464681
Timestamp    2017-05-03 18:55:39 Relayed By    ViaBTC
Timestamp    2017-05-03 18:55:46 Relayed By    BTC.com
7 seconds apart

464185    
Timestamp    2017-04-30 11:40:29 Relayed By    BitFury
Timestamp    2017-04-30 11:39:59 Relayed By    Bixin
30 seconds apart

463505    
Timestamp    2017-04-25 23:15:20 Relayed By    Bitcoin.com
Timestamp    2017-04-25 23:15:22 Relayed By    AntPool
2 seconds apart



imagine it this way knowing only one person can win... some STOP when they see a winner as there is no point wasting precious seconds.. and RESET and work on a new block.

this does not mean it takes them 30 minutes it just means that stopping the instant a winner crosses the line is good odds to stop and restart, rather than to continue for a few more seconds (1-30 seconds) in the narrow hope you are more valid than the fastest first.

there are many many layers of security, efficiencies, percentages, features at play. far more then dino is putting into context when he just counts how many "winning" blocks he sees. rather than how long it actually takes a pool to make a block win or lose.

there is a difference
again for emphasise
the number of blocks that win per hour vs how many blocks are created per hour

So roughly 0.18% of the blocks end up being orphaned. We know the averages that the various pools win a block. Since they stop the moment they know a block is found, we have no way of knowing what the real average would be for a given pool. I keep thinking about a calculation I saw last night from a few years back where someone posted how long it could take them to win a block given their hashrate and assuming the difficulty didn't change. It was anywhere from "immediately" to over 4 months running 24/7.

Frankly I think you're both "wrong" as, unless there's more info I'm not aware of, we simply don't have enough real data to know what the true average time is for a given pool. Saying if all but one pool stopped that the blocks would continue on being generated every 10 minutes with the exact same difficulty is clearly wrong. As is saying that the "win" average is an accurate representation of a pools true average if they were the only one solving blocks at a given difficulty.

[Decoded]

I'm pretty sure running a full node only helps with network propagation (Only if your internet connection is fast, otherwise someone else will do your job) and preventing false transactions from propagating. I your connection speed is too slow, you won't be sending anything, just receiving. You'll be a waste if bandwidth.

You will need to mine to make any difference to Bitcoin "politics", or make the blocks more secure.