[XPM] [ANN] Primecoin Release - First Scientific Computing Cryptocurrency

[elebit]

Yes, you could achieve some speedup using an ASIC for the computation, but you still need a fuckton of high speed memory, which will make the device cost more than it could mine in a lifetime. Now, if we see $50 LTC... that's a different story.

Exactly. The main reason we see Bitcoin ASIC miners is that every block is worth $2500. Or, the best protection from ASIC mining is low valuation if you want to put it that way.

If I had to venture a guess which one is the more complex circuit, scrypt or finding Cunningham prime chains, I would guess the latter. The sieve is also quite memory heavy. That does not directly translate to an ASIC performance gap of course, it's just an observation.

[arnuschky]

@Sunny: Why not merge your code with the high-performance version of mikaelh?

You stated that you can't do this due to licensing problems with libgmp, right? I think that that you are wrong: libgmp is LGPL, not GPL, and can therefore be used even in closed-source projects provided that you link to it only dynamically. Which primecoind does, so you would be fine even if primecoin would be closed-source.

(this is kind of a double-post as I am trying to speak to both developers at once..)

[crendore]

I wonder what kind of PPS a Parallella can achieve. At $99 I'm about to buy one.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone

1 x Parallella = 32 GFlops - $99 -  0.32 $/GFlop
1 x i5 4670K = 86 GFlops - $240 - 0.35 $/GFlop
And this is overlooking the fact that you would also need to buy the rest of the computer (case, memory, hard drive, etc).

So yes, i think it's quite an efficient processor for its price.  But would you mine a whole lot at 1 Parallela? probably not.  
You would need to get at least 10 or so.  They sell them in packs of 4 with all the extra cables required for $575.
http://shop.adapteva.com/collections/parallella/products/parallella-cluster-kit

Estimated shipping date of October.  By which time i don't know if mining primecoin with a CPU will really be a thing anymore.  But it might be a nice rig to have to mine other things that come along.

If you bought 2 of those 4 packs, you would have 256GFlops for $1150....

[maco]

Have they even filled their may orders? Look at the kickstarter comments no feedback

I wonder what kind of PPS a Parallella can achieve. At $99 I'm about to buy one.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone

1 x Parallella = 32 GFlops - $99 -  0.32 $/GFlop
1 x i5 4670K = 86 GFlops - $240 - 0.35 $/GFlop
And this is overlooking the fact that you would also need to buy the rest of the computer (case, memory, hard drive, etc).

So yes, i think it's quite an efficient processor for its price.  But would you mine a whole lot at 1 Parallela? probably not.  
You would need to get at least 10 or so.  They sell them in packs of 4 with all the extra cables required for $575.
http://shop.adapteva.com/collections/parallella/products/parallella-cluster-kit

Estimated shipping date of October.  By which time i don't know if mining primecoin with a CPU will really be a thing anymore.  But it might be a nice rig to have to mine other things that come along.

If you bought 2 of those 4 packs, you would have 256GFlops for $1150....

[AgentME]

Before I knew about cryptocoins, I ran a lot of GPU's for BOINC distrubuted computing projects. There are/were(?) heaps of CPU based Prime number finding projects but none of them ever used GPU, so I am agreeing that branching is not suitable for the hardware and that is why no one ever bothered to make a program to mine on them. For this reason I suspect we might never see a GPU or ASIC prime number miner.

This question comes from a complete non-computer engineer, but I'm curious. Since ASIC is designed to accomplish a specific task, wouldn't it be possible to create an ASIC to "mine" prime numbers? [This isn't a question about whether it would be a marketable device like the ASIC USB miners, just about the engineering side.]

We need a hyper geek who has:

* Designed processors
* Knows how SHA-256 works on a machine level
* Knows how prime number searching works and how to implement that at the machine level

They should be able to say for sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunningham_chain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generating_primes

My brain just hurts looking at these pages and the links that follow.  

I have extensive knowledge of prime number theory and how modern computers can be used to find them but this is not going to 'unlock' more efficient methods of mining the coins. First mining involves more than finding primes. Second and more important in an imaginary world where we had asic chips mining prime coin as the difficulty level shot into the sky the awards of coins per block diminish very low. The design of the coin is such that it yields 'less' the 'more' you throw at it and we would all be in the exact same place we are now.

Personally I think the beta testers of the coin may have perfected some 'better' builds to mine than we have available in public now. I have no proof of this and anyone who helped make this source has a right to use their knowledge to their advantage. We all have the right to not mine the coin.

Until prime coin has some regular uses other than just mining and selling on an exchange it will remain a commodity only. I admire the development team for it's creation at a time when a new coin is launched every other day.  Prime coin is popular now because it is unique and while the long term scientific value to be expected from the project is low it is a great step in a direction to design a coin that does something more than drive up electricity use. My advice is to just enjoy it as it is now. Give it a year or two to develop. I suspect if any 'advanced' methods' of mining prime coin are developed they will not be posted for everyone to use. Anyone that gets a powerful edge is most likely to keep it quiet and mine for their own benefit.

Bitcoin was designed to be a form of currency beyond traditional corporate and government control for the better of all but a majority of posts I read give me the impression most are mining to just make a quick buck. The current money system of the world revolves around greed. The true long term benefit to everyone would be a permanent change in how money changes hands in the world and negation of any entity to just 'print more bills' like all nations do now. I may be a minority opinion here but I think this result if achieved would be a much bigger win for everyone than just a few of us making some money in the short run.

So can we relax about GPU, FPGA, ASIC mining and think of the big picture?

More mining power is also about securing the network from attackers better. And if you mine faster than other people, you'll get more primecoins, so holding back on development is kind of silly.

[lucasjkr]

Whos' attacking the network?

Criminals? Why would they, they'ed lose an avenue to try to launder money?

Script Kiddies? If they could attack the network, wouldn't they be more motived to use the coins generated for value than to destroy the network? I'd assume that that would be the case at least.

So you're not protecting it from typical miscreants. Now, who else would attack it? Oh, that's right. A government. And if you think that all of ASICMINERS hardware combined with all of Avalons hardware and all Butterfly Labs' shitpped hardware provides any protection at all against a government, well, sorry. If we've got $15 million invested in ASICs, the gov't can just as easily do the same times 10 and take it down no matter how much you mining power we deploy.

Whos left to attack?

As noble as "protecting the network" sounds, no ones adding hashing power or priming power to any of the networks in order to protect it. They're doing it for profit, plain and simple. Otherwise the butterfly labs threads wouldn't be nearly as distraught as they are. People aren't spending $30,000 to protect it, nor are they paying $2k to get their hands on a $279 device from ebay in order to protect the network.

So, the OP's point stands. All any leapfrogging will do is cost a lot of people a lot of money in order to keep up, where they'll all end up in the same exact place at the end of the day.

[zax983]

still scam for me...

[monsterer]

I wonder what kind of PPS a Parallella can achieve. At $99 I'm about to buy one.

ARM chips are embedded processors designed for phones and other portable devices - performance is not a top priority, low power consumption is.

I wouldn't invest personally.

[Stinky_Pete]

As noble as "protecting the network" sounds, no ones adding hashing power or priming power to any of the networks in order to protect it.

I am.

They're doing it for profit, plain and simple.

I'm not.

I happen to believe in the concept of a decentralised, user-driven currency, and that is my principal reason for taking part. If I make a little money on the way, good, but it's not going to pay my electricity bills. And if it all falls apart I'll go back to Folding@home and BOINC.

[Stinky_Pete]

Have they even filled their may orders? Look at the kickstarter comments no feedback

I'm in for a 'cluster-in-box' from the Kickstarter project. Only the few big hitters have the hardware now.

[notme]

I wonder what kind of PPS a Parallella can achieve. At $99 I'm about to buy one.

ARM chips are embedded processors designed for phones and other portable devices - performance is not a top priority, low power consumption is.

I wouldn't invest personally.

The ARM is just the host processor.  The Parallella also has and FPGA grid and even more interestingly, a grid of custom parallel processors which would likely handle big int math well.

[ReCat]

Wow. I haven't heard of the Parallella before. It seems pretty awesome. Existing solutions can do OpenCL... Does that mean existing software can be dropped into this hardware?

[mhps]

As noble as "protecting the network" sounds, no ones adding hashing power or priming power to any of the networks in order to protect it.

I am.

They're doing it for profit, plain and simple.

I'm not.

I happen to believe in the concept of a decentralised, user-driven currency, and that is my principal reason for taking part. If I make a little money on the way, good, but it's not going to pay my electricity bills. And if it all falls apart I'll go back to Folding@home and BOINC.

+1

Some poeple don't understand cryotocurrencies, and capitalism ingeneral, use individual greed to do collective good.

[super3]

I wonder what kind of PPS a Parallella can achieve. At $99 I'm about to buy one.

ARM chips are embedded processors designed for phones and other portable devices - performance is not a top priority, low power consumption is.

I wouldn't invest personally.

The ARM is just the host processor.  The Parallella also has and FPGA grid and even more interestingly, a grid of custom parallel processors which would likely handle big int math well.

The epiphany cores are really small though. It would take some work to get mining working on them, and you won't be able to get Parallella in your hand for another few months. I think by then CPU mining will probably be dead or saturated on Primecoin.

If you can get your hands on the 64 core version, and another CPU coin came around it would probably be more cost effective than running a cloud farm.

[hasle2]

Was't getting any responses in the other thread so I thought I would try here.

Does anyone know if I need to run any commands when transferring wallets from one computer to another? I sent a few to one computer and then used that to transfer to my main wallet on another machine. It worked the first one or two times but the third transfer seems to have disappeared. The old wallet shows a balance of 0 while the main wallet has not received any coins. It's been around an hour now, every other transfer has taken seconds.

To transfer the wallet I would shut down primecoind, replace the old empty wallet with the new one and start primecoind again.

I'm wondering if this is a bug in the wallet or if there is some reason why this can't work.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[maco]

Was't getting any responses in the other thread so I thought I would try here.

Does anyone know if I need to run any commands when transferring wallets from one computer to another? I sent a few to one computer and then used that to transfer to my main wallet on another machine. It worked the first one or two times but the third transfer seems to have disappeared. The old wallet shows a balance of 0 while the main wallet has not received any coins. It's been around an hour now, every other transfer has taken seconds.

To transfer the wallet I would shut down primecoind, replace the old empty wallet with the new one and start primecoind again.

I'm wondering if this is a bug in the wallet or if there is some reason why this can't work.

Any help would be much appreciated.

It's really not that hard. Go to SFTP on your server

DOWNLOAD THE WALLET

stop primecoind

rm -f /.primecoin/wallet.dat (<< DO THIS ONLY IF YOUR WALLET IS DOWNLOADED & BACKED UP)  *CAUTION THIS COMMAND DELETES THE WALLET*

Then you can replace it with the one described here. I don't know if its trust worthy, but I will find out soon.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=255782.msg2805539#msg2805539

[hasle2]

Was't getting any responses in the other thread so I thought I would try here.

Does anyone know if I need to run any commands when transferring wallets from one computer to another? I sent a few to one computer and then used that to transfer to my main wallet on another machine. It worked the first one or two times but the third transfer seems to have disappeared. The old wallet shows a balance of 0 while the main wallet has not received any coins. It's been around an hour now, every other transfer has taken seconds.

To transfer the wallet I would shut down primecoind, replace the old empty wallet with the new one and start primecoind again.

I'm wondering if this is a bug in the wallet or if there is some reason why this can't work.

Any help would be much appreciated.

It's really not that hard. Go to SFTP on your server

DOWNLOAD THE WALLET

stop primecoind

rm -f /.primecoin/wallet.dat (<< DO THIS ONLY IF YOUR WALLET IS DOWNLOADED & BACKED UP)  *CAUTION THIS COMMAND DELETES THE WALLET*

Then you can replace it with the one described here. I don't know if its trust worthy, but I will find out soon.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=255782.msg2805539#msg2805539

That is pretty much what I was doing, I was seeing the new wallets with their transactions and balances. The issue was that when I transferred the balance of the second or third wallet the coins seemed to disappear. They were no longer in the original wallet and never made it to my main wallet. I checked and I had connections to the network so the transaction should have propagated. I wonder if there is a bug where the client configuration gets tied to the wallet and when the wallet it switched it corrupts the transactions.

[maco]

Was't getting any responses in the other thread so I thought I would try here.

Does anyone know if I need to run any commands when transferring wallets from one computer to another? I sent a few to one computer and then used that to transfer to my main wallet on another machine. It worked the first one or two times but the third transfer seems to have disappeared. The old wallet shows a balance of 0 while the main wallet has not received any coins. It's been around an hour now, every other transfer has taken seconds.

To transfer the wallet I would shut down primecoind, replace the old empty wallet with the new one and start primecoind again.

I'm wondering if this is a bug in the wallet or if there is some reason why this can't work.

Any help would be much appreciated.

It's really not that hard. Go to SFTP on your server

DOWNLOAD THE WALLET

stop primecoind

rm -f /.primecoin/wallet.dat (<< DO THIS ONLY IF YOUR WALLET IS DOWNLOADED & BACKED UP)  *CAUTION THIS COMMAND DELETES THE WALLET*

Then you can replace it with the one described here. I don't know if its trust worthy, but I will find out soon.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=255782.msg2805539#msg2805539

That is pretty much what I was doing, I was seeing the new wallets with their transactions and balances. The issue was that when I transferred the balance of the second or third wallet the coins seemed to disappear. They were no longer in the original wallet and never made it to my main wallet. I checked and I had connections to the network so the transaction should have propagated. I wonder if there is a bug where the client configuration gets tied to the wallet and when the wallet it switched it corrupts the transactions.

Wait, did you not use keypools? This could have gone terribly wrong at the simple fact that you did not have enough addresses in your wallet to handle it.  The command: primecoind --daemon keypools=10000 & would generate 90k addresses (roughly on the safe side) and from what I hear, it would avoid de-syncing, and can avoid bugs. That is not a good sign that it did not go to your main wallet. I don't know the answer to this one completely, but I know keypool should help (only when creating a new wallet) after deleting it. You should have done this before cloning or making duplicates of the same server

[Lauda]

It's certainly interesting what the future holds for XPM

[AgentME]

Whos' attacking the network?

Criminals? Why would they, they'ed lose an avenue to try to launder money?

Script Kiddies? If they could attack the network, wouldn't they be more motived to use the coins generated for value than to destroy the network? I'd assume that that would be the case at least.

So you're not protecting it from typical miscreants. Now, who else would attack it? Oh, that's right. A government. And if you think that all of ASICMINERS hardware combined with all of Avalons hardware and all Butterfly Labs' shitpped hardware provides any protection at all against a government, well, sorry. If we've got $15 million invested in ASICs, the gov't can just as easily do the same times 10 and take it down no matter how much you mining power we deploy.

Whos left to attack?

As noble as "protecting the network" sounds, no ones adding hashing power or priming power to any of the networks in order to protect it. They're doing it for profit, plain and simple. Otherwise the butterfly labs threads wouldn't be nearly as distraught as they are. People aren't spending $30,000 to protect it, nor are they paying $2k to get their hands on a $279 device from ebay in order to protect the network.

So, the OP's point stands. All any leapfrogging will do is cost a lot of people a lot of money in order to keep up, where they'll all end up in the same exact place at the end of the day.

Both Feathercoin and Terracoin have just suffered massive 51% attacks in the last few days. Feathercoin is at a higher market capitalization than Primecoin! This isn't some theoretical issue.