[ANN][YAC] YACoin ongoing development

[St.Bit]

IMHO the blockchain cummulative work calculation formula should be changed to something more sensible, eg. give PoS only a slightly higher priority than PoW. This would massively reduce such reorgs as seen in the posts above.

No, I don't agree with that.

PoS are far less common than PoW so they should be weighted far more.
I'd say the safest would be to require a PoW block after each PoS in order to overrule more than 3 PoW blocks. Otherwise the PoS wouldn't make it significantly harder to 51% than PoW.

I'm not thinking about the protocoll to change it's priorities, I mean the miners. If the honest miners don't agree with a non-legit fork they stay on the shorter, but legit one. A warning message for the clients would prevent them from getting double spent. The clients have all the PoS so they could effectively force the remaining miners to accept the new method.

[BChydro]

Sorry if this has already been asked, but what is the most up to date YAC wallet now? Also, I remember reading a while ago that a new wallet is being developed with control over individual sending addresses. Is this still in the works? I'd like to tip the dev team, which direction should I throw that to?

[St.Bit]

Sorry if this has already been asked, but what is the most up to date YAC wallet now? Also, I remember reading a while ago that a new wallet is being developed with control over individual sending addresses. Is this still in the works? I'd like to tip the dev team, which direction should I throw that to?

It is already aviable, but there will be some code checking bevor it will be the "official" version. I belive it's good to go, but that's your call. I'd wait for the new official version if you got a lot of kYACs otherwise go for it.

https://github.com/saironiq/yacoin-cc.git
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=276948.0

[Joe_Bauers]

Sorry if this has already been asked, but what is the most up to date YAC wallet now? Also, I remember reading a while ago that a new wallet is being developed with control over individual sending addresses. Is this still in the works? I'd like to tip the dev team, which direction should I throw that to?

The latest stable (non coin control) wallet is here: https://github.com/yacoin/yacoin/releases/tag/stable_0.4.0  This is what you should use with your main wallet.

Coin control should hopefully be added to the next stable release after some more testing is completed.

[sairon]

Sorry if this has already been asked, but what is the most up to date YAC wallet now? Also, I remember reading a while ago that a new wallet is being developed with control over individual sending addresses. Is this still in the works? I'd like to tip the dev team, which direction should I throw that to?

If you want to download prebuilt windows binary of Yacoin-QT with CC included (and the Yak logos, LOL), I've created this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=276948
Please report any bugs you find (but I hope there are no more bugs). You can send tips for the Coin Control to me.

Also, some crapcoin is copying my source changes for Coin Control!

IMPORTANT!
Stop using the published versions of Yacoin with Coin Control - there's a critical bug when NOT selecting a custom change address (the new change address is not reserved from keypool and thus your coins disappear forever). Fixed in recent git commit, updated binaries coming soon.

So you have fixed this bug in github source too? We are considering to add this in ZcCoin.
Thanks.

And there was one more story with EcoCoin dev e-mailing me concerning my changes to Abe block explorer. Funny as hell!

[St.Bit]

And there was one more story with EcoCoin dev e-mailing me concerning my changes to Abe block explorer. Funny as hell!

Plagiarism is the most honest form of appreciation.

[Gorgoy]

Hi all, I have had a question I've wanted to ask for a while now. Is there a way of knowing how many active nodes/wallets are operating on the network? Has there been much fluctuation in the number of active wallets? I also was curious if there was any plan of including a minor into the wallet, kinda like feathercoin wallet does, I think it would a be a great idea for people starting that is not too tech savvy and wanted to participate in CPU mining. Thanks

[sairon]

Hi all, I have had a question I've wanted to ask for a while now. Is there a way of knowing how many active nodes/wallets are operating on the network? Has there been much fluctuation in the number of active wallets?

Determining the number of active nodes should be possible by either forcing your client to connect to an unlimited number of nodes and waiting a long time (quick slow and dirty) OR you could parse the peers.dat file inside yacoin data directoy (where the yacoin.conf file is) and try pinging each IP from the list you get (may be inaccurate due to dropped ICMP packets on their firewall and whatnot) or better yet, connecting to the yacoin port (this might help against the firewall issue). But still, the nodes behind overly restrictive firewalls will appear as offline. So the best bet is to actually force the client to connect to all of them (and waiting, waiting, waiting...).

I also was curious if there was any plan of including a miner into the wallet, kinda like feathercoin wallet does, I think it would a be a great idea for people starting that is not too tech savvy and wanted to participate in CPU mining. Thanks.

This is on my TODO list, so it might get implemented, eventually.

[sairon]

I also was curious if there was any plan of including a minor into the wallet, kinda like feathercoin wallet does, I think it would a be a great idea for people starting that is not too tech savvy and wanted to participate in CPU mining. Thanks

But there is already CPU miner built-in all wallets. It is not as sophisticated nor it kickass as standalone CPU miner but it hashes! To run
it, start YACoin wallet with -gen parameter and eventualy add -genproclimit=X where X is number of CPU cores you want to mine with.

To mine with just one CPU core use:

Code:

yacoin-qt.exe -gen -genproclimit=1

I'm assuming he meant a user-friendly clicky GUI thingy.

[sairon]

I'm assuming he meant a user-friendly clicky GUI thingy.

Not sure why that feat is removed in the first place? 

No idea.
BTW, we should really switch from BerkeleyDB to LevelDB... These client start-up times are driving me crazy.

[sairon]

Hi all, I have had a question I've wanted to ask for a while now. Is there a way of knowing how many active nodes/wallets are operating on the network? Has there been much fluctuation in the number of active wallets?

Determining the number of active nodes should be possible by either forcing your client to connect to an unlimited number of nodes and waiting a long time (quick slow and dirty) OR you could parse the peers.dat file inside yacoin data directoy (where the yacoin.conf file is) and try pinging each IP from the list you get (may be inaccurate due to dropped ICMP packets on their firewall and whatnot) or better yet, connecting to the yacoin port (this might help against the firewall issue). But still, the nodes behind overly restrictive firewalls will appear as offline. So the best bet is to actually force the client to connect to all of them (and waiting, waiting, waiting...).

Heh, so actually you can read the number of peers in the peers.dat file by looking at debug.log file:

Code:

Flushed 13214 addresses to peers.dat  114ms

I've also modified the source to output these addresses in plaintext format. Working on gathering more info (last seen, etc...), then I might publish a KML file with approximate location of these IP addresses and their status (online/offline) so it could be viewed as an overlay in Google Maps/Earth.

EDIT: Done! https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://yacexplorer.tk/static/peers.kml
You can get the raw files here http://yacexplorer.tk/graphs.htm#stats

Online/offline status is not (yet) included. However, I doubt it will be of any use as it is constantly changing, so I'm giving this a very low priority.
Some screenshot pr0n below (US and EU):

[Joe_Bauers]

I'm assuming he meant a user-friendly clicky GUI thingy.

Not sure why that feat is removed in the first place? 

No idea.
BTW, we should really switch from BerkeleyDB to LevelDB... These client start-up times are driving me crazy.

* ∞   This need to be in the top things to do for the next next (0.4.2) client.

[Joe_Bauers]

I'm assuming he meant a user-friendly clicky GUI thingy.

Not sure why that feat is removed in the first place? 

PPC and NVC were not intended to be CPU coins.

[St.Bit]

Done! https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://yacexplorer.tk/static/peers.kml
You can get the raw files here http://yacexplorer.tk/graphs.htm#stats

Great work. I really like it.

I like the distribution, but there are still far too much free areas. Has anyone heard about someone doing this on bitcoin?

[ilostcoins]

Very cool google map view. YACoin has some of the best developer support around despite its low price.

[kentt]

Out of curiosity, what is this saying that suggest an attack is going on rather than just people mining? I'm new to cryptocurrencies.

As an attacker you mine on your own chain for a while (without broadcasting it to all the others), then suddenly add your blocks and so overrule the legit chain. All transactions on the legit chain while that period will be reversed so you can buy stuff without actually loosing coins.

Well, this might not have been intentional. Someone could have had a lot of PoS blocks found all at once or some PoS blocks were not broadcast to all nodes (and with PoS having a higher priority than PoW, they easily overtook the chain). Also, this was happening a lot in the early days of YAC (diff = 0 and stuff).

The replacing blocks were AFIK all PoW so this isn't just a minor coincidence. It's either a attacker that wants to harm YAC or a serious bug. None of that should be taken too lightly. We will see.

Nope,

Code:

11.9.2013 16:54:36 REORGANIZE: Connect 1 blocks; 00000007c5835b4968bd..547db4922a8b8e71ff85

was a PoS block that wiped out 34 PoW blocks. (You see it's a PoS by the hash's first bytes - 547db4922a8b8e71ff85 - no leading zeroes = very lwo difficulty = PoS block).

My node switched to "~15 blocks remaining" mode, e.g. not synced, so it was not just ordinary PoS "overtake". Only after 15 more legit blocks
were found node went to synced mode.

This has been a known problem for months.  Check about 30 pages back or so (I don't care enough to find the link).  This would be a really trivial attack.  I think it's surprising that this hasn't be exploited more often.

[BChydro]

Sorry if this has already been asked, but what is the most up to date YAC wallet now? Also, I remember reading a while ago that a new wallet is being developed with control over individual sending addresses. Is this still in the works? I'd like to tip the dev team, which direction should I throw that to?

If you want to download prebuilt windows binary of Yacoin-QT with CC included (and the Yak logos, LOL), I've created this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=276948
Please report any bugs you find (but I hope there are no more bugs). You can send tips for the Coin Control to me.

Sent you a little thanks for the hard work!

[sairon]

I'm assuming he meant a user-friendly clicky GUI thingy.

Not sure why that feat is removed in the first place?  

No idea.
BTW, we should really switch from BerkeleyDB to LevelDB... These client start-up times are driving me crazy.

Why you think it is up to database? Bitcoin was using BerkeleyDB for years and even though blockchain size was in gigabytes and number of
transactions far exceeded any other cryptocoin I never experienced as long startups as with YACoin. Most LTC and NVC "clones" start much
faster than YACoin as well. Is there some kind of tool that could monitor what exactly is YACoin doing for those 6+ minutes at it's startup?

I'm not certain it's the DB, but I inserted debug statements into the loading code and most of the time was spent loading the blockchain into memory. IMHO the main reason is the number of blocks (we will be on par with BTC pretty soon, and BTC switched to LevelDB AGES ago). Dunno about the other coins though. Also the loading algorithms might be heavily outdated and thus slow. That said, this needs further investigation and a fix ASAP.

Some code references:
* https://github.com/yacoin/yacoin/blob/master/src/init.cpp#L671 (the comment in particular)
* https://github.com/yacoin/yacoin/blob/master/src/db.cpp#L824 (IIRC the slowest part of the code)
* https://github.com/yacoin/yacoin/blob/master/src/db.cpp#L642 (some heavy-weight sanity checking, IIRC the second slowest part)
* https://github.com/yacoin/yacoin/blob/master/src/db.cpp#L884 (maybe [but I'm really just guessing] this might be also a fairly slow operation, especially as the number of coin stakes will grow)

EDIT: Done! https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://yacexplorer.tk/static/peers.kml
You can get the raw files here http://yacexplorer.tk/graphs.htm#stats

Online/offline status is not (yet) included. However, I doubt it will be of any use as it is constantly changing, so I'm giving this a very low priority.
Some screenshot pr0n below (US and EU):

Cool maps there!

Thanks!

As a sidenote, I have YAC, XPM and BTC clients running on my computer, each with maxconnections=32 in .conf file. After 12 hours or so, the
situation with number of nodes connected is usualy something like listed bellow.

YACoin - 32 connections
Bitcoin - 24 connections
Primecoin - 12 connections

No idea how to properly interpret that data though. One of the reasons why YACoin gets so much more connections could be the lack of UPnP
with Coin Control versions (which I solved using PortMapper), e.g. nodes that connect to network after my node went online need to connect
to other nodes to complete syncing but due to Coin Control nodes not being able to accept connections it is my node that ends up "slammed".

FYI, I'm located at Eastern Europe.

8 connections are plenty if you're not a pool or a miner. I once tweaked the node on my block explorer server to have as much connections as possible (it was hovering around 130 IIRC), but I saw no actual benefit, so I closed the port in firewall and allowed only outbound connection (thus reducing the chance on potential attackers).
Also, the code is smart enough to connect to different subnets to minimize the risk of connecting to "bad" nodes (eg. someone could spam your peer list with nodes that he controls - and they will usually fall into the same network subnet). So you might just happen to be one of only a few nodes in that particular network "area".

[sairon]

8 connections are plenty if you're not a pool or a miner. I once tweaked the node on my block explorer server to have as much connections as possible (it was hovering around 130 IIRC), but I saw no actual benefit, so I closed the port in firewall and allowed only outbound connection (thus reducing the chance on potential attackers).

Network can't exist if everyone allow just outbound connections.

True. However, I don't see myself reverting that decision as my VPS bill is 100% payment for I/O requests at the moment. More connections = more block requests from peers = more I/O load on my server = higher upkeep cost for me.

[Joe_Bauers]

It's the DB. NVC is currently at 42081 and PPC is at 69666.