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

[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.

[Lauda]

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 !

Exactly. I like it being more rare :3

[Trillium]

I think we should wait until a GPU miner is actually released before we start guesstimating difficulties and those scenarios. I think a lot of people here are very desperate to 'strike it rich' on a new GPU miner release for this coin. It really shows in some of the other threads, to the point where it is cringe worthy.

Maybe it's just my line of work, but I don't believe in things until I see some evidence.

We have seen no evidence for a GPU miner, other than a few words typed on a webpage on the internet.

If mtrlt did not have a reputation from his creation of previous miners, then most people would too be as skeptical as I am.

Even if a GPU miner is released tomorrow, keep in mind that the 'difference' between CPU and GPU mining will not be as extreme as it was for bitcoin and the SHA-256 coins when its GPU miners were released. Bitcoin miners experienced a ~100 fold improvement on GPU if you were to compare them when investing an equal amount on the hardware (CPU vs GPU). A primecoin GPU miner will be far less of a improvement than this, some have speculated as low as only a handful of times more efficient than CPU alone.

The GPU miner's performance will depend to a good extent on the CPU itself. Whereas with current GPU mining it depends almost entirely on only the GPU itself. If you think your 5x 7950 scrypt rig with celeron CPU is going to tear up primecoin, well, maybe you are in for a shock. We'll have to wait and see.

I don't want to sound like a tinfoil-hatter, but there is also a chance this is an extremely elaborate scam. There has been almost $10,000 USD in donations sent to that bitcoin address now. It would not be the first time that a shocking scam has gone down on these forums and a lot of people lost BTC because of it. Also keep in mind that the buying/selling/exchange of accounts on this forum is permitted.

Assuming the above was false, I don't mean to diminish mtrlt's efforts and I wish him the best of luck with the development. That being said I think GPU mining on primecoin is unlikely to be the glorious horizon that so many seem to think it will be.

[bcp19]

I think we should wait until a GPU miner is actually released before we start guesstimating difficulties and those scenarios. I think a lot of people here are very desperate to 'strike it rich' on a new GPU miner release for this coin. It really shows in some of the other threads, to the point where it is cringe worthy.

Maybe it's just my line of work, but I don't believe in things until I see some evidence.

We have seen no evidence for a GPU miner, other than a few words typed on a webpage on the internet.

If mtrlt did not have a reputation from his creation of previous miners, then most people would too be as skeptical as I am.

Even if a GPU miner is released tomorrow, keep in mind that the 'difference' between CPU and GPU mining will not be as extreme as it was for bitcoin and the SHA-256 coins when its GPU miners were released. Bitcoin miners experienced a ~100 fold improvement on GPU if you were to compare them when investing an equal amount on the hardware (CPU vs GPU). A primecoin GPU miner will be far less of a improvement than this, some have speculated as low as only a handful of times more efficient than CPU alone.

The GPU miner's performance will depend to a good extent on the CPU itself. Whereas with current GPU mining it depends almost entirely on only the GPU itself. If you think your 5x 7950 scrypt rig with celeron CPU is going to tear up primecoin, well, maybe you are in for a shock. We'll have to wait and see.

I don't want to sound like a tinfoil-hatter, but there is also a chance this is an extremely elaborate scam. There has been almost $10,000 USD in donations sent to that bitcoin address now. It would not be the first time that a shocking scam has gone down on these forums and a lot of people lost BTC because of it. Also keep in mind that the buying/selling/exchange of accounts on this forum is permitted.

Assuming the above was false, I don't mean to diminish mtrlt's efforts and I wish him the best of luck with the development. That being said I think GPU mining on primecoin is unlikely to be the glorious horizon that so many seem to think it will be.

You are 100% correct.  Some calculations do run 100x faster on GPU, some only run 4-6 times faster, while others barely get a 2x boost.  I think the fermat testing will prove to fall into the latter areas.  The thing a lot of people don't realize is that you can't just take CGminer and make a few changes and presto it works.  This is likely to have been a major rewrite and then some.  I personally would want a 5x or better speed boost to offset the added power usage, 10x may be doable... 20x I'd be amazed.

[crendore]

I would like to open up my mining nodes to accept incomming connections so that they also support the network instead of just mining.  Can someone give me a quick run down on how to do this in linux? What port should i use? should i use iptables? ufw?

Thanks!

[crendore]

I would like to open up my mining nodes to accept incomming connections so that they also support the network instead of just mining.  Can someone give me a quick run down on how to do this in linux? What port should i use? should i use iptables? ufw?

Thanks!

What distribution? By default it should be open.
Are you behind a router?

No router, ubuntu.  I guess it's already open then.  Having some trouble syncing on my local primecoin instance though, anyone share an addnode? i'm stuck back 13 hours ago.