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

[Promethium]

First mature Coin WoooHo!

[maka]

If the block generating rate keeps at roughly 1/min, in one year there will be 365*24*60=525600 blocks.  At difficulty 7 the reward of one block is 999/(7*7)=20.  At difficulty 10 the reward of one block will be 999/(10*10)=10.  In one year the difficulty will most likely be less than 10.  If we assume the average reward for one block is roughly 16, then the total money supply should be 8409600, about 8~9 million.

[eule]

I thought difficulty will rise a lot when if GPU miners appear?
edit: if not when 

[techbytes]

Does anyone recommend overclocking a CPU?  This is my processor: http://ark.intel.com/products/52210/Intel-Core-i5-2500K-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_70-GHz

It's currently at 3.3 GHz and the Max Turbo Frequency    3.7 GHz

Anyone recommend boosting it for the Max Turbo? and do you believe that will help?

I wouldn't bother overclocking just yet.  My older laptop is finding more blocks than my i7 desktop.  I'm going to fireup my intel atom and see what it can do.   


-tb-

I tried with my atom but it kept showing 0 primespersec, even after 30 minutes.
If you get it working, tell me!

I'm getting 0 PPS with my intel atom as well but cpu is pegged at 100% so it is doing something.  I'm going to let it run and will let you know if and when it gets a block.   


-tb-

[simondlr]

Sunny, I have a question related to the scientific benefit of this altcoin. I did some further reading on what is being generated and on cunningham chains. It's a very rusty initial dive into this, so forgive me if I am wrong.

Primecoin won't really find new primes (for now at least), since they are so large to reasonably process in a wallet, and they would be at the end of longer chains, rather than the current length of chains (might be wrong assumptions here)?

The idea is to find plenty variations of cunningham chains in order to hopefully better understand the distribution of primes, and whether they could eventually give clues to the distribution of primes in general?

[maka]

I thought difficulty will rise a lot when GPU miners appear?

The prime number searching range for Primecoin is roughly 2^255 ~ 2^2000 ( 76 digits ~ 602 digits ).  For the sake of simplicity, let's assume the primes are about 10^100.  According to the Prime number theorem, the prime number distribution of this range is about 1 prime number in 230 integers.  When difficulty grows from 7 to 8, it means the miner needs to find a prime chain of length 8 instead of 7, making the likelihood to 1/230 of before.  In other words, it takes 230 times longer to find a 8-chain than a 7-chain if we assume the mining power remain the same.  It would take  230*230*230 = 12167000 times longer to find a 10-chain, that's 10 million times more difficult.

Now let's take the GPU and other possible device into account.  The GPU is very efficient of calculating hash, but in the specific case of primecoin, it doesn't seem have the same kind of advantage.  Unless there are some specially designed hardware for prime searching, the mining speed at most will be less than 1000x faster.

So it is quite clear that even with 10000x more miners equipped with monster machines, it is still not even close to reach difficulty 10.

[Vorksholk]

Upping personal bounty for a standalone cpu-miner that is as fast OR faster than built-in primecoin one, and is capable of working with pools and getting shares to 2.5BTC.   Must provide windows and linux binaries to the public, as well as source code.

[Boing7898]

I was getting 100-150 primespersec yesterday with my Phenom X4 965 but today I'm getting barely 50. Did something change? o.o

[eule]

@ maka: Thanks for that explanation, makes sense! The quite quickly sinking block reward made me think that.

[ReCat]

What will the value of this coin be with how few of them are in existence?

[eule]

What will the value of this coin be with how few of them are in existence?

Have a look at the two forum exchanges:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=252611.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=252875.0

I think we're still in a price finding phase, although it's clear no one wants to get rid of their precious primecoins for pocket money.

[maka]

@ maka: Thanks for that explanation, makes sense! The quite quickly sinking block reward made me think that.

You are very welcome.  Yeah, I didn't mined a single block in the last 24 hours

[mustyoshi]

Left my somewhat optimized version running over night and came back to 3 additional blocks mined.
Getting roughly ~60 pps with 500K sieve size and basic optimization flags. Running on a single thread of a stock i3 2120.

[eule]

Left my somewhat optimized version running over night and came back to 3 additional blocks mined.
Getting roughly ~60 pps with 500K sieve size and basic optimization flags. Running on a single thread of a stock i3 2120.

I tried ommiting two zeroes from nMaxSieveSize and got ~400-800 pps using 6 cores of an old i7, quickly changed back to normal version though due to not finding blocks in a seconds interval. 
Now i fell i must try it again, either with one or two zeroes less than normal.  

[ReCat]

Left my somewhat optimized version running over night and came back to 3 additional blocks mined.
Getting roughly ~60 pps with 500K sieve size and basic optimization flags. Running on a single thread of a stock i3 2120.

Dude. Post it. Keeping optimized miners secret is a bad move for your rep and the coin. Don't make me get my own optimized one to post.

[eule]

He did:

Has anybody else tried messing with the nMaxSieveSize variable?
By chopping a zero off of it, I seemed to be able to get almost a 5x increase in pps. I know that reducing the sieve size would effectively reduce the amount of numbers checked for each run of the sieve and then reduce the likelyhood of finding a block, but is pps more important than search size?

[nmersulypnem]

I thought difficulty will rise a lot when GPU miners appear?

The prime number searching range for Primecoin is roughly 2^100 ~ 2^2000 ( 100 digits ~ 2000 digits ).  For the sake of simplicity, let's assume the primes are about 2^100.  According to the Prime number theorem, the prime number distribution of this range is about 1 prime number in 230 integers.  When difficulty grows from 7 to 8, it means the miner needs to find a prime chain of length 8 instead of 7, making the likelihood to 1/230 of before.  In other word, it takes 230 times longer to find a 8-chain than a 7-chain if we assume the mining power remain the same.  It would take  230*230*230 = 12167000 times longer to find a 10-chain, that's 10 million times more difficult.

Now let's take the GPU and other possible device into account.  The GPU is very efficient of calculating hash, but in the specific case of primecoin, it doesn't seem have the same kind of advantage.  Unless there are some specially designed hardware for prime searching, the mining speed at most will be less than 1000x faster.

So it is quite clear that even with 10000x more miners equipped with monster machines, it is still not even close to reach difficulty 10.

Where do you see that range in the code?  I don't see it...

[mustyoshi]

Left my somewhat optimized version running over night and came back to 3 additional blocks mined.
Getting roughly ~60 pps with 500K sieve size and basic optimization flags. Running on a single thread of a stock i3 2120.

Dude. Post it. Keeping optimized miners secret is a bad move for your rep and the coin. Don't make me get my own optimized one to post.

Other than the sieve size change. I also opted to pass the blockheader hash through the functions, instead of making calls to block->GetHeaderHash() every time. I'm not sure what kind of improvements that actually made since I also changed the sieve size when I first did it.

But it stops me from running double SHA256 like 3 times more than I used to.

[maka]

I thought difficulty will rise a lot when GPU miners appear?

The prime number searching range for Primecoin is roughly 2^100 ~ 2^2000 ( 100 digits ~ 2000 digits ).  For the sake of simplicity, let's assume the primes are about 2^100.  According to the Prime number theorem, the prime number distribution of this range is about 1 prime number in 230 integers.  When difficulty grows from 7 to 8, it means the miner needs to find a prime chain of length 8 instead of 7, making the likelihood to 1/230 of before.  In other word, it takes 230 times longer to find a 8-chain than a 7-chain if we assume the mining power remain the same.  It would take  230*230*230 = 12167000 times longer to find a 10-chain, that's 10 million times more difficult.

Now let's take the GPU and other possible device into account.  The GPU is very efficient of calculating hash, but in the specific case of primecoin, it doesn't seem have the same kind of advantage.  Unless there are some specially designed hardware for prime searching, the mining speed at most will be less than 1000x faster.

So it is quite clear that even with 10000x more miners equipped with monster machines, it is still not even close to reach difficulty 10.

Where do you see that range in the code?  I don't see it...

<prime.h>

static const CBigNum bnPrimeMax = (bnOne << 2000) - 1;
static const CBigNum bnPrimeMin = (bnOne << 255);

[eule]

nMaxSieveSize = 1000000u  ~130 - 230 pps
nMaxSieveSize = 100000u    ~230 - 400 pps
nMaxSieveSize = 10000u      ~350 - 800 pps

Running the second one now, no idea if this will make me mine more blocks or none. Also not sure about the other thing you mentioned, goes above my head.