[DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated

[markm]

Even the ancient devcoin code has yet to display the kind of massive RAM-usage that that GeistGeld and I0Coin did, because we only have one block per ten minutes on average whereas I0Coin is much faster thus has way the heck more blocks to deal with and GeistGeld is maybe even too darn fast to be practical so has even way the heck more than I0Coin.

Plus of course, GeistGeld and I0Coin might have more blocks that were mined using p2pool than DeVCoin does because they have spent more time not being on public pools thus having to be mined using p2pool by individuals instead of being mined maybe on a pool that does not put all the miner payouts into the coinbase transaction eating up RAM...

Also, one of the coders told me soem tiem back that he was in fact adapting the fixed I0Coin, not working directly from bitcoin code.

I had gotten the impression from the wording of his posts that he was ignoring the whole fixed I0Coin for some reason or for no apparent reason and was instead working from raw bitcoin code, but he corrected that impression.

That is part of why it seems weird to now hear that supposedly hs has backgtacked and is in fact working directly from bitcoin and creating a devcoin version that lacks the fixes that were put into I0Coin.

rsnel did the I0Coin fixes that is why we wanted to get rsnel if possible to do the other coins too, since he might grok his fixes/code better than others might.

-MarkM-

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[georgem]

Even the ancient devcoin code has yet to display the kind of massive RAM-usage that that GeistGeld and I0Coin did, because we only have one block per ten minutes on average whereas I0Coin is much faster thus has way the heck more blocks to deal with and GeistGeld is maybe even too darn fast to be practical so has even way the heck more than I0Coin.

I was wondering:

Is there a way to limit the ram usage of a process in ubuntu server?

Is there a command for that?

I have installed a few daemons on a server, and they eat up all ram very fast.

[markm]

Unix-type operating-systems use all available RAM for file buffers and such, so don't look at total RAM in use, look at the resident set and whether the swap partition is getting used up.

I0Coin used to need about four gigs though and GeistGeld would crash from lack of RAM on an 8 gig machine even no other coins running so I moved it to 16+ gig machines.

The new halfway-fixed GeistGeld (the quick-and-dirty fix) uses way the heck less RAM and the properly fixed I0Coin even less.

Bitcoin you can still run in a gig I think, but maybe not in half a gig or not run it well in half a gig anyway.

Most other coins, if not merged mined, seem to fit into half a gig or so.

-MarkM-

[georgem]

Unix-type operating-systems use all available RAM for file buffers and such, so don't look at total RAM in use, look at the resident set and whether the swap partition is getting used up.

I0Coin used to need about four gigs though and GeistGeld would crash from lack of RAM on an 8 gig machine even no other coins running so I moved it to 16+ gig machines.

The new halfway-fixed GeistGeld (the quick-and-dirty fix) uses way the heck less RAM and the properly fixed I0Coin even less.

Bitcoin you can still run in a gig I think, but maybe not in half a gig or not run it well in half a gig anyway.

Most other coins, if not merged mined, seem to fit into half a gig or so.

-MarkM-

thanks. So I should try to somehow enlarge the swap partition. Is this possible?

[markm]

Nowadays I have noticed Fedora defaults the swap partition to only a little larger than the RAM. Maybe for good reason, as it does seem to get into swap-thrashing if you do try the old twice the size of the RAM or the even older three times the size of the RAM for swap.

Basically you probably want a gigabyte per coin for long-established coins, and maybe even for the newfangled "almost as fast as GeistGeld" coins since they go through blocks fast; and a gig per merged mined coin.

Getting into swap while mining is a poor idea as it leads to p2pool complaining that daemons are taking more than 5 seconds to respond, and it might well be that it complains because slow access to getblock calls maybe degrades mining performance for all the coins it is merging.

-MarkM-

[georgem]

Basically you probably want a gigabyte per coin for long-established coins,...

That coincidies with my own experience.

I am working on a side project, something like a coinmarketcap overview of about 50 coins. Mixed with api chartdata of the biggest exchanges.
Everything in one site.

My server has 24 gigs. And runs smoothly as long as I have about 20 daemons ... but if I try to start all 50 daemons (yes I compiled 50 daemons by hand  ) sooner or later everything crashes.

At one point even apache crashed and I couldn't access the server, had to restart.

Another strange thing I noticed: when I do a pidof most coins only list one process (which is good), but I have seen some daemons namely namecoind and infinitecoind list many more ids when I do pidof. Why do they need many processes instead of just one???

I basically need most daemons only to make a getblockcount call and getdifficulty of the respective coin. (additionaly to provide donation adresses for visitors, so they can donate to my project whatever coin they like)

The basic thing I want to do is calculate the total money supply for every coin. And I do not want to rely on external sources/blockexplorers because they could be offline (as I have seen happen many times with coinmarketcap.com) so I don't want to do it like them.

Do you know if there is a way to have a naked stripped down daemon who doesn't do anything else then provide geblockcount and moneysupply if available?

I have seen that some coins provide the variable "moneysupply" when you do a RPC call. Others don't and you therefor have to calculate the blockcount and then apply the halving rules over time etc to get to the amount of total actual coins in circulation.

PS I never had any problems with the devcoind daemon. I use version 32501, which is the newest one I hope.

[markm]

I don't know, I already threw money at the problem by leasing three dedicated servers, two being 16 gigs one being 24 gigs, for a year paid in advance.

They paid for themselves and more by CPU mining primecoin and protoshares (back when they actually were able to find blocks of those reasonably often), not even thinking about the massive number of BBQcoins they picked up during BBQcoin's under the radar mine it with CPUs year (last year), so I just split up all the daemons I need for merged mining among those three servers and look around for interesting things to do with all the spare RAM they have still left over. (The spare cores are still mining primecoin, albeit not finding blocks very often.)

Its like $30 or $35 so a month for a 16 gig dedicated machine with unlimited bandwidth on a gigabit-per-second ethernet and heck running the same machine at home would cost me more than that just in electricity without even considering getting a high bandwidth internet connection here at home comparable to what they have at the datacentre so it seems a good deal to me.

(Its not the hosting link in my sig; PM me if you want a referral.)

-MarkM-

[georgem]

I don't know, I already threw money at the problem by leasing three dedicated servers, two being 16 gigs one being 24 gigs, for a year paid in advance.

They paid for themselves and more by CPU mining primecoin and protoshares, not even thinking about the massive number of BBQcoins they picked up during BBQcoin's under the radar mine it with CPUs year (last year), so I just split up all the daemons I need for merged mining among those three servers look around for insteresting things to do with all the spare RAM they have still left over.

Its like $30 or so a month for a 16 gig dedicated machine with unlimited bandwidth on a gigabit-per-second ethernet and heck running the same machine at home would cost me more than that just in electricity so it seems a good deal to me.

-MarkM-

that is a good price, I pay about twice that where I am. I have 3x 24 gig.

Splitting the daemons on all available servers was my second thought too.

Or, since I only need to do a getblockcount once every ten minutes or so (and then write the variable into mysql) I will probably start a daemon, wait for it to update and then stop it. Then restart it every 10 minutes with a cronjob.
Why should it run all the time when I don't need it in realtime.

Do you see any problems with that?

[markm]

Check /var/log/messages, when the O/S shuts down tasks due to running out of RAM it should indicate that in there.

I am not sure whether swap actually helps, maybe it does. The 8 gig machine here at home that it kept crashing on only had 2 gigs of swap because I upgraded the RAm after the disk had already been set up and the operating system installed. So try swap, maybe it will work. It might take a while to gt responses to RPC calsl but if you aren't mining that shouldn't be a problem.

Very fast block coins though would maybe thrash at some point, a block arrives so it starts to swap out another coin to make room for block processing, then that other coin also hears about a block and it too tries to unswap, pretty soon maybe all the fast coins are all trying to unswap so only the slow coins actually stay swapped a while, if even they do since they still keep hearing about transactions maybe if they are coins actually used to transact...

Maybe just go with five machines, ten daemons per machine?

But wait, three times 24 is more than fifty, you should be able to run 50 coins with that much RAM. Are you using old non-memory-fixed I0Coin and/or GeistGeld or something?

Stopping and starting the daemons would likely run into the problem of being blocks behind on the blockchain, you presumably want the latest block in order to get the stats you want.

Maybe just make a simple little daemon that just gets blocks and tallies up the stats you want, maybe something written in python or something?

Or look at the various libs people have made for processing blockchains and doing the p2p to get blockchains.

-MarkM-

[georgem]

thanks, I will look into it.

Although I have three servers, at least one of them I need to be stable at all times... that's why I don't think I am going to install any daemon there.

[giftculturewriting]

Is it one share per ten hours?

In fact it seems to me that ideally we should at some point no longer need to pay authors by the word, because, hopefully, we will eventually be able to do authors the same way we do any other developers of free open source software, which is to say, if we find a good author who habitually as a lifestyle spends ten hours per week creating free open source stuff they should be able to get onto the receivers list as a developer of free open source stuff.

Notice that they get the same one share regardless of whether they only spend the absolute minimum - ten hours per week - working on such stuff or they do such stuff 40 hours a week or 60 hours a week or 80 hours a week or whatever.

The idea was we are looking for those people who already naturally as a lifestyle contribute their time freely to free open source development.

Did you read the above paragraph of mine that you quoted?

As it answers the question you posted above it.

It sounded so low I wanted to clarify and make sure you weren't describing something hypothetical (like in earlier parts of the discussion). Maybe I should have written... IS it just ONE share per TEN hours? ...And it would have been clearer.

EDIT: Forgot to add, part of the reason this surprised me so much was that I just got a one share bounty for writing a short review of a devcoin wallet installer.

The thing is though, why would you settle for only one share for all those hours instead of getting one share per 1000 words?

Well one reason, I suppose would be if you didn't want to post the material to Devtome.

But basically the crazy-high pay currently going to Devtome authors kind of discourages anyone from going for the lifestyle author of free open source software option, not to mention the vast number of shares that go to Devtome authors grossly dilutes the actual value that a lifestyle author's lonely single share would actually be worth on the exchanges.

I'd say it definitely encourages lifestyle authors of written material at this point. It might also encourage people who are not using it in the spirit it was intended. But if it went to the lifestyle developer=certain number of shares, you'd probably have to have the dedicated pool of developers *first*, transition the program, then there'd be a lot fewer shares that would be worth more. You'd also theoretically be able to up the number of shares given to lifestyle developers for their work (for instance if that section in a receiver file looked like devtome earnings currently does)

[smeagol]

I would like to propose a bounty for qt images and new icons.  8 shares for the images and icons used in the qt, 4 shares for the second best set of icons.

Any objections, or should anything be changed??

There were already objections here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310280.msg4095549#msg4095549

It should be 4 shares for the qt images that is what I proposed.

Are there any objections to 4 shares, then 2?

This also includes a new icon set.  (new address book, etc.)

[smeagol]

My server has 24 gigs. And runs smoothly as long as I have about 20 daemons ... but if I try to start all 50 daemons (yes I compiled 50 daemons by hand  ) sooner or later everything crashes.

Is that a physical server, or virtual server?  That's a lot of daemons!

Also, a moneysupply call would be nice.

[markm]

It sounded so low I wanted to clarify and make sure you weren't describing something hypothetical (like in earlier parts of the discussion). Maybe I should have written... IS it just ONE share per TEN hours? ...And it would have been clearer.

It is just ONE share for having a lifestyle commitment to free open source development that chronically consumes at least ten hours per week/month of your time.

Even if it consumes your every waking hour that is one share - one life, dedicated to such a lifestyle. Ten hours is a minimum, surely it is very hard for such people to limit themselves to only working on the stuff ten hours, heck that is less than one day, usually when they get on a roll they are likely to very shortly notice it is morning again yet they feel like they only just woke up and got into doing some good work... When you are a lifestyle developer, it is good to try to remember to sleep at least once a week whether you need to or not.

(Ten hours is the week you go on vacation and have to work while "using the bathroom" and such because your family thinks you are actually not doing any work that week so you can spend time with them... )

-MarkM-

[eeh]

#On the Charity Github, which US rocket is shown being launched?
#What is the most current version of the Windows Devcoin-qt?
#Name a pool where DVC is merge mined.
#What is unthinkingbit's DVC earnings address?
#What was the difficulty of block 118485?

Answers

Edit this wiki page and enter your responses below along with your Devtome username and your DVC address. Be sure to save the page so I know who had the earliest revision for tracking purposes.

# Apollo 15 rocket
# Windows Client Devcoin_QT 0.8.5 from Sidhujag
# Bitparking Merge Mining Pool http://mmpool.bitparking.com/pool
# [address removed]
# 466074503.558

Answers from cyke64 [address removed]

WINNER! Congrats to cyke64. Your DVC is on its way. Congrats for participating. If anyone would like to see more of these hunts, please tell me. My theory is that it is a way to get participants to dig into existing DVC related files and sites. Familiarity breeds DVC!

[weisoq]

...I'd say it definitely encourages lifestyle authors of written material at this point. It might also encourage people who are not using it in the spirit it was intended. But if it went to the lifestyle developer=certain number of shares, you'd probably have to have the dedicated pool of developers *first*, transition the program, then there'd be a lot fewer shares that would be worth more. You'd also theoretically be able to up the number of shares given to lifestyle developers for their work (for instance if that section in a receiver file looked like devtome earnings currently does)

One way would be to apportion each aspect of devcoin a weighting of periodic generation. For example, we might say devtome = 180m * x%; developing = 180m * y%, bounties = 180m * z% etc. Then all payments are made from a sub-pool. But the problem with that is it changes the calculation dynamics, where for example a bounty would also need to become a % rather than an absolute sum. And then, what if there are no bounties achieved in a round, does that roll over to the next month - would that help catalyse getting it done, or would it instead just be 'wasted' when it could have been earned by somebody else.

That's why I've only suggested limiting the max payout per round - unless specifically designated like a bounty. Because if that cap is at the right level it should result in work and pay trending towards some sort of equilibrium where all parties - writers, developers, one-off bounty workers, admins, buyers etc - think it's worth their time and effort. And in rounds where that isn't the case, the dynamics of relative interest up or down should be corrected, because anything considered too low/very high will feedback into disincentive/greater incentive in the next one.

So I think the issues and same ends can be addressed more easily with cap (and maybe floor) adjustments over time without going through the hassle (and unknowns) of adding more complications.

[markm]

Well hopefully pouring out these huge bribes initially is paying off, since we do seem to have attracted at least one lifestyle writer plus we have gotten a lot of admins from the pool of Devtome authors.

Hopefully in what will seem after the fact like not long at all we'll have found plenty of such people, at which point maybe we can do the same "overkill pay to launch the thing" approach with the next major project, whatever that ends up being; and although the authors who squandered their DeVCoins will moan and complain at the insane pay the new type of people get and how writing isn't even bringing in minimum wage anymore the lifestyle "gotta write, gonna write, how much do I have to pay to be able to write, writing is my addiction" people will be sitting back looking at their one entire share and their huge pile of sell offers sitting at 200 or more satoshis per coin and the price of the bitcoins those satoshis are the lowest denomination of and think "holy cow I am doing well, those new guys are gonna be millionaires unless they squander their coins and if they do squander them guess who will be buying them cheap while they foolishly dump them"...

(By then hopefully the pay for articles will be shares of the ad revenue of devtome, and of course lifestyle authors who write as a lifestyle are just as free to post to Devtome for shares of its ad revenue as the new guys are to build their rocketships or whatever it is that the new guys do...)

-MarkM-

[weisoq]

Well yeah let's hope so. I won't even go into my desire to see longer-term just how much writers really value their writing and are willing to contribute to marketing, interest and appeal by making it completely self-sustaining...

[georgem]

so can please anyone explain this.

With every round we have 180 Million DVC that are send to devtome.

Or how exactly does this work.

Who is the reciever of this money? Escrow?

[markm]

Recently all my sell offers on Vircurex way up through 193 satoshis got bought up by the way, in case no-one else noticed.

So are the people who claimed the previous times my coins bought at around 30 sold for up near or over 200, or even up to and just beyond 300, was just some weird pump and dump scheme orchestrated by Fontas now going to tell us this too was such a thing; that it is not true that the price ranges from down near 30 and maybe sometimes below to up near 200 and sometimes to 300 or higher?

Notice it happened fast, again. Waiting until you hear about it then firing up a client then waiting for six confirms before you can exchange your coins might not be the best way to cash in on such cycles; despite the inherent risk in sitting coins on third party sites it might we worthwhile to start putting some profit coins, coins you can well afford to lose, into buy offers one offer per satoshi of price all the way down from 250, 300 or 350 to some nice high figure that is seldom actually reached (so that you don't sell them at a price these spikes tend to blow right on through and keep on going...)

Also maybe as you sell them (at double or triple or quadruple or more what you paid for them) start taking some of the profit and putting it into satoshi by satoshi buy offers from one satoshi up through 30 or so, to profit also on the low end.

-MarkM-