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

[Schleicher]

I have also been working on some charting for Primecoin. It's pretty crude so far but a detailed zoomable graph on the difficulty can be found here:
http://192.241.170.170/
[...]

I'm getting a blank page with an error in Chrome's developer console:
Uncaught Error: NotFoundError: DOM Exception 8 (dygraph-combined.js:2)

EDIT:
Running Chrome 28.0.1500.95 m, Win8 x64

No problem here. It takes a few seconds until the graph appears.
(Chrome 29)

[hasle2]

I have also been working on some charting for Primecoin. It's pretty crude so far but a detailed zoomable graph on the difficulty can be found here:
http://192.241.170.170/
[...]

I'm getting a blank page with an error in Chrome's developer console:
Uncaught Error: NotFoundError: DOM Exception 8 (dygraph-combined.js:2)

EDIT:
Running Chrome 28.0.1500.95 m, Win8 x64

No problem here. It takes a few seconds until the graph appears.
(Chrome 29)

Works for me on win 7 with 28.0.1500.95 m. Might be a win 8 issue.

[wantrepreneur]

XPM is looking red hot

[Lyddite]

Latest charts here:

http://lyddit.blogspot.fi/2013/08/one-month-of-primecoin.html

[Zalfrin]

logarithmic scale on the difficulty chart might be interesting

[Lyddite]

logarithmic scale on the difficulty chart might be interesting

Not really, just makes everything look more flat.

[Zalfrin]

logarithmic scale on the difficulty chart might be interesting

Not really, just makes everything look more flat.

Yes, as a previous poster mentioned the difficulty isn't a linear measurement, so my hope with the logarithmic scale was to compensate for that. I guess that would be a natural log scale (base e, not 10). 

[jubalix]

is it data missing in those drops at the 9+ diff, and the way its rising now is it chain length or GPU miners

the diff is exponential, but something is just eating through that.....making it look linear...!


or is that the latest hp release

[dreamwatcher]

CryptoCoin explorer Primecoin update:

Phase two of testing the new explorer design has begun.

http://cryptocoinexplorer2.com:5555

This version has all (I Hope ),the logic issues from test version one fixed and working for the basic explorer.

The address page is still limited to the running balance of the address. However, test version 3 is already well under way and it will have the full transaction history of the address available along with the "spent output' field on the transaction page. The search system should be in place (At most by test version 3.5), but manual searching can be done by simply observing the url addresses a bit and placing your own values in place of the explorer generated values in the url.

Test version 4 is slated to incorporate most of the 'frills' features on the Homepage of the explorer.

Test version 5 will be in the incorporation of the API.

[AgentME]

logarithmic scale on the difficulty chart might be interesting

Not really, just makes everything look more flat.

Yes, as a previous poster mentioned the difficulty isn't a linear measurement, so my hope with the logarithmic scale was to compensate for that. I guess that would be a natural log scale (base e, not 10). 

If the data is already a sort of log-measurement, then doing another log-scale would just be doubling it up.

[bidji29]

We know the diff is not linear.
But it seems when we go to a new integer, the difficulty is lower.
Whit x.95 is more difficult than x+1.  (8,95 more difficult than 9)

Is this right?

[OnkelPaul]

We know the diff is not linear.
But it seems when we go to a new integer, the difficulty is lower.
Whit x.95 is more difficult than x+1.  (8,95 more difficult than 9)

Is this right?

It should not be but it probably is.

In my understanding, a block should be valid if the length of its chain is either greater than the current difficulty, or its chain length is equal to the integer part of the current difficulty and the fractional bits part (I don't know exactly how that is determined) is greater than the fractional part of the difficulty.
So at difficulty 9.5, every block with a chain length of 10 or more should be accepted, and approximately half of the length 9 blocks should be accepted.

However, my intuition is that the difficulty graph with its sharp increases whenever an integral difficulty value has been reached implies that the fractional bits are being considered even when the chain length is greater than the difficulty.
Maybe someone could look at the source to see how it's actually done (I'm at work right now and can't do it, and when I last looked at the source I found this fractional part business really confusing and skipped it.)

Onkel Paul

[refer_2_me]

We know the diff is not linear.
But it seems when we go to a new integer, the difficulty is lower.
Whit x.95 is more difficult than x+1.  (8,95 more difficult than 9)

Is this right?

It should not be but it probably is.

In my understanding, a block should be valid if the length of its chain is either greater than the current difficulty, or its chain length is equal to the integer part of the current difficulty and the fractional bits part (I don't know exactly how that is determined) is greater than the fractional part of the difficulty.
So at difficulty 9.5, every block with a chain length of 10 or more should be accepted, and approximately half of the length 9 blocks should be accepted.

However, my intuition is that the difficulty graph with its sharp increases whenever an integral difficulty value has been reached implies that the fractional bits are being considered even when the chain length is greater than the difficulty.
Maybe someone could look at the source to see how it's actually done (I'm at work right now and can't do it, and when I last looked at the source I found this fractional part business really confusing and skipped it.)

Onkel Paul

From the design paper:
http://ppcoin.org/static/primecoin-paper.pdf

Let k be the prime chain length. The prime chain is p0, p1, …, pk-1. Let r be the Fermat
test remainder of the next number in chain pk. Now pk/r is used to measure the
difficulty of the chain. Even though the distribution of r/pk is not strictly uniform, but
experiments have shown that the difficulty adjustment behavior is reasonably good in
practice. The prime chain length is then computed with a fractional length part:

d = k + (pk-r)/pk

Note if pk passes probable primality tests then it should be considered as a chain of
higher integral length.

A continuous length target adjustment is employed with similar features to the difficulty
adjustment in ppcoin (King 2012). Length target is stepped up or down through integral
boundaries during length target adjustment, at fixed step-up/step-down threshold of
255/256 <-> 1.

[Lyddite]

If you can, please run a public (open port accessible from the outside) of Primecoin.
I think that will all the solo mining, there are a lot of nodes, but not enough public nodes.
I have around 1000 connections total for only running 4 public nodes, it's pretty crazy.

Ouch, maybe should restart the daemon every once in a while. I haven't tried to limit anything and this is what I have.

"connections" : 40,
"connections" : 16,
"connections" : 37,
"connections" : 20,
"connections" : 55,

[Lauda]

XPM is still a trend.

[Tamis]

Difficulty increase as clearly been slowing down for the past 48h clearly showing that the number of blocks found is lowering (as most of us miners sadly experienced).
Only = +0.01888007 which is ridiculous compared to what we were used to see that was around +0.07 a day if not more.  The lowering started around 08/08. Lyddite  will surelly have a nice graph for us :)

This is resulting in a huge increase in price which is great for us miners having to cope with lower and lower blocks each days especially since the last 48h.

I was about to close my little farm, might keep it up a little more...

[Lyddite]

Difficulty increase as clearly been slowing down for the past 48h clearly showing that the number of blocks found is lowering (as most of us miners sadly experienced).
Only = +0.01888007 which is ridiculous compared to what we were used to see that was around +0.07 a day if not more.  The lowering started around 08/08. Lyddite  will surelly have a nice graph for us

This is resulting in a huge increase in price which is great for us miners having to cope with lower and lower blocks each days especially since the last 48h.

I was about to close my little farm, might keep it up a little more...

My luck has turned for the worse also but 1-2 blocks per day is ok.

This will be a kind of pain point for Primecoin I think. The increased price on the exchanges probably will keep miners motivated despite the diminishing returns. Many more miners will be necessary to push the difficulty up to 10.

From what I have mined over while the difficulty has been > 9, about 10% are 10-chains, the rest all all 9 chains.

The high performance primecoin miner has had many fixes and optimizations over the past while and I believe that there if probably little left in terms of low hanging fruit there. Now that the "fractional difficulty" for 9-chains is high enough, tweaking roundsievepercentage, sievepercentage and sievesize for the best efficiency is where one should focus if one continues to mine intensively.

For those who are new to linux and the bash shell and are curious to find out what kind of primes have been have generated by their miners, here's the oneliner to I used.

Code:

 primecoind  listtransactions "" 100 |grep blockhash |  sed -e "s/.* : //" -e "s/,//"  |xargs -n 1 -I '{}' primecoind getblock '{}' |grep primechain

Append

Code:

 | grep [CN]09 | wc -l 

to the above line to count your 9-chains and

Code:

 | grep [CN]0a | wc -l 

to count your 10-chains.  The "[CN]" in the grep keeps 09 or 0a in the latter hexadecimal part of the data from being counted. If you have more than 100 transactions in your account then increase the 100 to something greater than the amount of transactions for that account.

[Tamis]

Now that the "fractional difficulty" for 9-chains is high enough, tweaking roundsievepercentage, sievepercentage and sievesize for the best efficiency is where one should focus if one continues to mine intensively.

Interesting !  Would anyone care to elaborate ?

[sdmented]

I just have my stuff set at default for hp9, is that not a good idea then? 

[Trillium]

From what I understand Mikaelh and others have done extensive testing to determine the optimum values for all of those variables. Unless you have an extremely good understanding of what you are tweaking and how that alters the mining process then it is best to use the defaults, as you could easily misinterpret what is happening and actually reduce your mining performance. (As a matter of fact, please do that so I can mine more easily  )