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

[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  )

[Spoetnik]

faucet ?

one would be nice considering this coin is impossible to mine..
i tried every night for a week and got nothing
ultra waste of time and energy !

[Trillium]

faucet ?

one would be nice considering this coin is impossible to mine..
i tried every night for a week and got nothing
ultra waste of time and energy !

Well either your hardware is not so great or you are unlucky or both. Consider pool mining if you are so desperate for some return.

Here's one of my miner boxes:

https://i.imgur.com/CjL22NC.jpg

[ReCat]

Damn I wish I had a mining rig up. I'll probably get back to mining once my rack server goes online in the datacenter I sent it to. We're using it for hosting websites, so it's already paying for itself and profitability isn't a problem.

[rocks]

As someone new to Primecoin, can someone explain to me how this was not created to be only beneficial to early miners in the first month, with little profit or incentive for future miners?

In the first two weeks of Primecoin's life, over 100,000 coins were generated a day while difficulty was around 7. This means that it was both relatively easy to find blocks and blocks were highly valuable.

http://cryptometer.org/primecoin_90_day_charts.html

In just one month the number of coins generated per day has fallen to ~10K and at the same time it is much more difficult to find a block due to increased difficulty. Which means that the amount of coins received per work falls exponentially since it is both harder to find a block and blocks yield fewer coins.

With GPU mining about to come out soon, the difficulty will rapidly rise and we can expect only ~1K or less coins to be generated per day. This is an insignificant amount compared to the first two weeks.

What this means is that those that got in early (first 1-2 weeks) will have generated most of the coins for themselves, leaving little incentive or room for profit for those not involved in the launch.

I was pretty interested in participating in Primecoin when I first saw it recently, but after exploring more it seems to be designed to overly reward those that launched it with little benefit for anyone else. To me those are not traits for a successful alt coin.

[crendore]

As someone new to Primecoin, can someone explain to me how this was not created to be only beneficial to early miners in the first month, with little profit or incentive for future miners?

In the first two weeks of Primecoin's life, over 100,000 coins were generated a day while difficulty was around 7. This means that it was both relatively easy to find blocks and blocks were highly valuable.

http://cryptometer.org/primecoin_90_day_charts.html

In just one month the number of coins generated per day has fallen to ~10K and at the same time it is much more difficult to find a block due to increased difficulty. Which means that the amount of coins received per work falls exponentially since it is both harder to find a block and blocks yield fewer coins.

With GPU mining about to come out soon, the difficulty will rapidly rise and we can expect only ~1K or less coins to be generated per day. This is an insignificant amount compared to the first two weeks.

What this means is that those that got in early (first 1-2 weeks) will have generated most of the coins for themselves, leaving little incentive or room for profit for those not involved in the launch.

I was pretty interested in participating in Primecoin when I first saw it recently, but after exploring more it seems to be designed to overly reward those that launched it with little benefit for anyone else. To me those are not traits for a successful alt coin.

Two things:
1)  There are far worse coins guilty of maliciously manipulated distribution schemes only to profit the early adopters and creators.  As an example check out Extreme coin, just came out today.  Runs out of coins in 2 months. 

2) Mining is not the only way to participate in a crypto currency.  If you like primecoin so much, why not do something with it, build a service, be a pioneer with primecoin.  I'm sure some of the first people to make primecoin services are going to make a heck of a lot more money than the miners anyway.

[Trillium]

As someone new to Primecoin, can someone explain to me how this was not created to be only beneficial to early miners in the first month, with little profit or incentive for future miners?

In the first two weeks of Primecoin's life, over 100,000 coins were generated a day while difficulty was around 7. This means that it was both relatively easy to find blocks and blocks were highly valuable.

http://cryptometer.org/primecoin_90_day_charts.html

In just one month the number of coins generated per day has fallen to ~10K and at the same time it is much more difficult to find a block due to increased difficulty. Which means that the amount of coins received per work falls exponentially since it is both harder to find a block and blocks yield fewer coins.

With GPU mining about to come out soon, the difficulty will rapidly rise and we can expect only ~1K or less coins to be generated per day. This is an insignificant amount compared to the first two weeks.

What this means is that those that got in early (first 1-2 weeks) will have generated most of the coins for themselves, leaving little incentive or room for profit for those not involved in the launch.

I was pretty interested in participating in Primecoin when I first saw it recently, but after exploring more it seems to be designed to overly reward those that launched it with little benefit for anyone else. To me those are not traits for a successful alt coin.

Couldn't you say exactly the same about bitcoin a few years ago?

[mechs]

faucet ?

one would be nice considering this coin is impossible to mine..
i tried every night for a week and got nothing
ultra waste of time and energy !

Well either your hardware is not so great or you are unlucky or both. Consider pool mining if you are so desperate for some return.

Here's one of my miner boxes:

https://i.imgur.com/CjL22NC.jpg

What the system spec of this rig?

[rocks]

As someone new to Primecoin, can someone explain to me how this was not created to be only beneficial to early miners in the first month, with little profit or incentive for future miners?

In the first two weeks of Primecoin's life, over 100,000 coins were generated a day while difficulty was around 7. This means that it was both relatively easy to find blocks and blocks were highly valuable.

http://cryptometer.org/primecoin_90_day_charts.html

In just one month the number of coins generated per day has fallen to ~10K and at the same time it is much more difficult to find a block due to increased difficulty. Which means that the amount of coins received per work falls exponentially since it is both harder to find a block and blocks yield fewer coins.

With GPU mining about to come out soon, the difficulty will rapidly rise and we can expect only ~1K or less coins to be generated per day. This is an insignificant amount compared to the first two weeks.

What this means is that those that got in early (first 1-2 weeks) will have generated most of the coins for themselves, leaving little incentive or room for profit for those not involved in the launch.

I was pretty interested in participating in Primecoin when I first saw it recently, but after exploring more it seems to be designed to overly reward those that launched it with little benefit for anyone else. To me those are not traits for a successful alt coin.

Couldn't you say exactly the same about bitcoin a few years ago?

All crypto coins have an early adopter benefit, bitcoin is no exception.

My point is that the decrease in block reward payout greatly exaggerates this effect in Primecoin. Once GPU mining comes out the per block reward will decrease significantly, which means that those mining in a few months will never be able to mine the # of XPM that individuals were able to in the first weeks, no matter how much H/W they add. With bitcoin you may need a lot more H/W now to mine coins with ASIC difficulty, but roughly the same number of coins per day are released.

With Bitcoin, today 3600 bitcoins are released every day while 7200 bitcoins were released per day in the first 4 year period.

With Primecoin, in the first weeks over 100K coins were mined per day. Soon with GPUs most likely only 100s of coins will be able to be mined per day. That is very unbalanced.

[mechs]

As someone new to Primecoin, can someone explain to me how this was not created to be only beneficial to early miners in the first month, with little profit or incentive for future miners?

In the first two weeks of Primecoin's life, over 100,000 coins were generated a day while difficulty was around 7. This means that it was both relatively easy to find blocks and blocks were highly valuable.

http://cryptometer.org/primecoin_90_day_charts.html

In just one month the number of coins generated per day has fallen to ~10K and at the same time it is much more difficult to find a block due to increased difficulty. Which means that the amount of coins received per work falls exponentially since it is both harder to find a block and blocks yield fewer coins.

With GPU mining about to come out soon, the difficulty will rapidly rise and we can expect only ~1K or less coins to be generated per day. This is an insignificant amount compared to the first two weeks.

What this means is that those that got in early (first 1-2 weeks) will have generated most of the coins for themselves, leaving little incentive or room for profit for those not involved in the launch.

I was pretty interested in participating in Primecoin when I first saw it recently, but after exploring more it seems to be designed to overly reward those that launched it with little benefit for anyone else. To me those are not traits for a successful alt coin.

Couldn't you say exactly the same about bitcoin a few years ago?

All crypto coins have an early adopter benefit, bitcoin is no exception.

My point is that the decrease in block reward payout greatly exaggerates this effect in Primecoin. Once GPU mining comes out the per block reward will decrease significantly, which means that those mining in a few months will never be able to mine the # of XPM that individuals were able to in the first weeks, no matter how much H/W they add. With bitcoin you may need a lot more H/W now to mine coins with ASIC difficulty, but roughly the same number of coins per day are released.

With Bitcoin, today 3600 bitcoins are released every day while 7200 bitcoins were released per day in the first 4 year period.

With Primecoin, in the first weeks over 100K coins were mined per day. Soon with GPUs most likely only 100s of coins will be able to be mined per day. That is very unbalanced.

Not sure if I agree with you on the magnitutde and rapidity of this change.  First you are assuming there will be a GPU miner which is several orders of magnitude faster than CPU miners.  I do not think this will be true.  I think primecoins are not as GPU friendly versus CPUs as bitcoins and litecoins are.

Also, the block reward is calculated as 999/difficulty²
At the current difficult of 9 that is a block reward of about 12.3.
Even if difficulty goes up to 12 with GPU miners (and I think it will be much more gradual than that), then the block reward would become about 7. 
Even in the far future, if difficulty ever reaches 20, then the block reward will be 2.5 and I think that would be decades in the future.

I think the difficulty increases will become more gradual with maybe a small blip up with GPU miners.  If GPU miners are 100X more efficient, well then you may be proven correct.  However, my guess is they are more likely to be "only" 2 to 3 times more efficient than CPUs.  Hell, maybe they won't be any more efficient as the type of calculations required to mine primecoins really is more suited to CPU designs than GPUs which were created to calculate polygons.

[Tamis]

With Primecoin, in the first weeks over 100K coins were mined per day. Soon with GPUs most likely only 100s of coins will be able to be mined per day. That is very unbalanced.

And that is just perfect !

[bcp19]

As someone new to Primecoin, can someone explain to me how this was not created to be only beneficial to early miners in the first month, with little profit or incentive for future miners?

In the first two weeks of Primecoin's life, over 100,000 coins were generated a day while difficulty was around 7. This means that it was both relatively easy to find blocks and blocks were highly valuable.

http://cryptometer.org/primecoin_90_day_charts.html

In just one month the number of coins generated per day has fallen to ~10K and at the same time it is much more difficult to find a block due to increased difficulty. Which means that the amount of coins received per work falls exponentially since it is both harder to find a block and blocks yield fewer coins.

With GPU mining about to come out soon, the difficulty will rapidly rise and we can expect only ~1K or less coins to be generated per day. This is an insignificant amount compared to the first two weeks.

What this means is that those that got in early (first 1-2 weeks) will have generated most of the coins for themselves, leaving little incentive or room for profit for those not involved in the launch.

I was pretty interested in participating in Primecoin when I first saw it recently, but after exploring more it seems to be designed to overly reward those that launched it with little benefit for anyone else. To me those are not traits for a successful alt coin.

Couldn't you say exactly the same about bitcoin a few years ago?

All crypto coins have an early adopter benefit, bitcoin is no exception.

My point is that the decrease in block reward payout greatly exaggerates this effect in Primecoin. Once GPU mining comes out the per block reward will decrease significantly, which means that those mining in a few months will never be able to mine the # of XPM that individuals were able to in the first weeks, no matter how much H/W they add. With bitcoin you may need a lot more H/W now to mine coins with ASIC difficulty, but roughly the same number of coins per day are released.

With Bitcoin, today 3600 bitcoins are released every day while 7200 bitcoins were released per day in the first 4 year period.

With Primecoin, in the first weeks over 100K coins were mined per day. Soon with GPUs most likely only 100s of coins will be able to be mined per day. That is very unbalanced.

If the GPUs caused it to drop to 100s of coins per day, don't you think they'd leave in a big hurry?

To reach this unlikely scenario though, difficulty would have to climb somewhere in the neighborhood of 35-50 which I doubt is possible.

Remember also, primecoin has no cap like bitcoin, so a different method of limiting coins was put into place.