[ANN][YAC] YACoin ongoing development

[jomay]

I suspect the only reason to start a new coin, with no attempt to innovate, is as another pump'n'dump.

Yes, plus YAC is listed already and it might confuse possible users if there is a second one. A relaunch only makes sense if there is a need to change the concept.

Considering the amount of resources I had to bring to bear to mine less than people with a single PC at launch time?

If you are talking about me: don't worry. I haven't mined that much with my i7. I was also extremely lucky. I opened the browser in the morning and thought, hey, why not try to compile sth. in Linux? I just had installed VirtualBox a day ago...
edit: I have mined far less YACs than people bought on the exchange.

And you are absolutely right: it is and was very easy to get a significant number of YACs on the exchange. The money supply of YAC is worth ~1200 BTC right now. Maybe that's a fair price for a successful launch and listing at an exchange and some developers + pools.

I am also happy to contribute, but I do not have much time.

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[WindMaster]

I've not noticed any difference on may 14th when the N++ event happened.

1) difficulty was supposed to drop - I left nothing

I suspect a lot of people had the wrong impression about what would happen when N changed from 32 to 64.  My impression from the official YACoin thread is that people were expecting an instantaneous drop of difficulty and a simultaneous instantaneous increase in the block reward.  The reality is that difficulty is based on block solving rate of the network at large, and only indirectly affected by N as the result of N affecting hash rate of the network at large.  And block reward is derived from difficulty.  The change from N=32 to N=64 caused about a ~20% drop in hash rates for the available CPU miner implementations.  I note that difficulty has indeed been dropping.  I've looked at it a few times today and it's down to about 8.1 now (and was 8.25 a few hours ago).

The rate of difficulty recalc after each block certainly could've been faster though.  It seems to move at rather glacial speeds.  We can't change that now though.

2) GPUs were supposed to take a hit - AFAIK they still own the network.

This one I'm unsure about.  I thought for sure that if there were a significant number of GPU implementations floating around, someone was going to post one by now (as a claim to fame) as soon as GPU mining would have become unprofitable (which by my calculations is probably getting close to becoming unprofitable as YAC prices drop).

Anyone that has followed my posts through the days after the coin launched knows that I experimented with GPU implementation of scrypt+chacha20/8(N,1,1), the hashing algorithm used by YAC.  I never got as far as making it work with cgminer or mining with it.  I just created a basic OpenCL kernel (no cgminer interface), performed some benchmarks at various values of N, didn't bother doing any major optimizations, and decided I needed something that would go significantly faster (my GPU farm only consists of 24 Radeon 5850's and 24 Radeon 6950's), as it took me about 1.5 days to do it and difficulty was already skyrocketing.  At that point I dropped it and went straight to writing a Verilog implementation for FPGA's, knowing that I could probably only pull that off up through N=32 and would have a limited time to make it happen (in the end, I got about 1.5 days of FPGA mining in before N=64).

We won't know for sure until someone posts a modified cgminer what their hash rates ended up.  I stopped mining altogether at N=64, as that basically killed viability of my FPGA implementation.  I can still place'n'route an FPGA design at N=64 but the projected clock rates from the Xilinx tools are dramatically slower than for N=32 with nearly 4x the logic area (meaning only 1/4 as many parallel computation cores are possible in the available logic area) and it just doesn't look like it would be worth the effort.  N=128 won't even place'n'route, the design is just too dense.  So at this point I'm going to state that I believe N=64 kills profitability of any FPGA attempt (with current FPGA technology) and N=128 isn't even routable and placeable on current FPGA technology (at least without going to off-chip memory, DDR3 or otherwise).

Currently I get far more YAC by buying it up on BTER than I would by mining, with any of the technologies I have available.  My GPU farm is mining LTC right now.  If there are indeed GPU farms mining YAC, I'd be expecting them to start switching back to LTC or BTC for profitability reasons either now or in the near future (well, unless YAC value goes way way up).

So, that's about all the answers I have at the moment.

[bitdwarf]

This thread is worth already a 20% jump.

[cryptrol]

Windmaster, are you willing to share the code you developed for opencl ?
Maybe we can work together to improve it or test anyway.

[thdim]

that's so good news, don't give up on YAC, it's the only coin that everybody can mine something! this alone is a huge motivation to not give up on it.

[evilscoop]

This one I'm unsure about.  I thought for sure that if there were a significant number of GPU implementations floating around, someone was going to post one by now (as a claim to fame) as soon as GPU mining would have become unprofitable (which by my calculations is probably getting close to becoming unprofitable as YAC prices drop).

have to agree, I speculate that those that say gpu is possible are actually referring to the aws cloud net's
There was some adverts around for on some dodgy sales sites for a gpu yac miner, but they never actually came to be anything...and so likely scam...

[evilscoop]

fair point...thx

[tyrion70]

Let me volunteer for fixing the UPnP issue and recompiling QT client and normal .exe. I've succcesfully build a number of qt clients now for some altcoins the last few days. All with upnp support. I'll have to read up on how to push changes to git cuz i never done that before, I'll PM u windmaster if I get stuck there.

I expect it to be done tonight (i'm at gmt-1 i think)

Great initiative!

[eule]

I've not noticed any difference on may 14th when the N++ event happened.

1) difficulty was supposed to drop - I left nothing
2) GPUs were supposed to take a hit - AFAIK they still own the network.

Answers?

My VPS only makes 230 khashes now instead of 315 before. Not sure if related, maybe the hoster got new customers. 

[Joe_Bauers]

WindMaster this is a great idea!  

[sairon]

First, kudos for your initiave.

* Code sign Windows binaries to prevent modification?  This kinda screws anonymity though.  If I use my own Verisign code-signing keys, just about everyone knows who I am IRL.

You can sign the binaries with a GPG key dedicated to this project and let some other trusted community members sign this keypair with their own GPG keys, thus making a web of trust around this project. Anonymity preserved, possible signature revocation should the private key ever get compromised, etc.

[Joe_Bauers]

Maybe pocopoco is Satoshi 

[procrypto]

Delighted you have taken the bull by the horns, WindMaster. Don't have mad amounts of time today, but I'm definitely along for the ride and will offer all the hours I can. Tonight I hope to get the blockchain explorer up and running, as this feels like something we really need working now for the long-term credibility of YAC.

[sairon]

Tonight I hope to get the blockchain explorer up and running, as this feels like something we really need working now for the long-term credibility of YAC.

^ this.

[nearmiss]

Tonight I hope to get the blockchain explorer up and running, as this feels like something we really need working now for the long-term credibility of YAC.

Awesome!  This is very  much needed.  I started looking into Abe, but didn't get too far on required modifications for YAC yet.  I'll gladly send some YAC your way for your efforts.

[Joe_Bauers]

Another quick text edit that can be made is:

Change all instances of  "Enter a YaCoin address (e.g. 4Zo1ga6xuKuQ7JV7M9rGDoxdbYwV5zgQJ5)" to a YAC address [starts with Y]


Also in net.cpp

need to do something about  strDNSSeed


I also recompiled my version to change

static const int MAX_OUTBOUND_CONNECTIONS = 8;

to

static const int MAX_OUTBOUND_CONNECTIONS = 200;

which seems to mitigate any UPNP issues.

static const int MAX_OUTBOUND_CONNECTIONS = 8; is old code and should really be changed for all forks.

[sairon]

static const int MAX_OUTBOUND_CONNECTIONS = 8; is old code and should really be changed for all forks.

yeah, I'm behind an overly-restrictive firewall, so I do this to all coins I use.

[seleme]

How to scrape bter price, I'd make a basic android price check app but don't have idea how to pull the price from there.

[nearmiss]

How to scrape bter price, I'd make a basic android price check app but don't have idea how to pull the price from there.

http://bter.com/api/1/ticker/yac_btc

[Joe_Bauers]

static const int MAX_OUTBOUND_CONNECTIONS = 8;

to

static const int MAX_OUTBOUND_CONNECTIONS = 200;

You better not do it because you will consume all router connections on outgoing connections and other nodes won't be able to connect to your node and thus sync with blockchain.
8 outgoing connections are there to make sure your node can sync. After it synced, it should allow nodes coming online later to connect to it and sync themselves. Once established,
connection is just connection, there are no differences whatsoever between outgoing and incoming connections beside the name.

Until there is valid UPnP YAC client you can use software like Port Mapper to allow incoming connections. I suggesting learning the tools like it because you never know when some
other software you would like to use might have troubles with incoming connections but there are no developers around, software is closed source or something.

More testing probably is needed to verify the effects, but it works fine for me. My understanding is that the original 8 connection limit is legacy code, and the more connections the better.