[NUG] - Nugget Bounty Thread

[DeathAndTaxes]

Using something from the block you are making as well as from the previous block means you can mine harder to try for a winning block.

Just keep changing something to get a different merkle root until you get one that makes your block a winning block. Spend enough computing power on it and maybe all blocks will be winning blocks!

-MarkM-

Yeah, that's basically mining.
But the process would delay your block too much to hope it being the first accepted block.
That could be a nice race to watch.

Well no it would be trivial to exploit.  Say the odds of hitting a lucky/super/gold/handOfGod block are 1 in 10,000.  You could just keep constructing merkle trees (by changing the coinbase) until you found one which was a "winner".  It would take on average 10,000 attempts.  A good CPU can do that in a fraction of a second.  

Essentially someone would release an optimized miner and all blocks (as in 100%) would get the super rate.  The advantage of using the prior block is that it is something you can't control.  Even that however does allow a large pool (say one with 20%+ of hashing power) to "cheat" unless the odds vs the "bonus" are high enough that it really has no material increase in overall reward.

How is changing the coinbase any different from changing the nonce? In both cases you have to compute a new hash.
So yes of course you could keep constructing other merkletrees but finding one which makes the block hash (i) below the target and (ii) complying with the super block rule would take 10,000 more times than just (i). So by the time you found the super block you would be 10,000 blocks behind the blockchain.

Um you are forgetting that one can use the same coinbase multiple times.  You wouldn't find a "winning" coinbase/merkle tree and then try one hash and throw it away.    It takes a lot more than 10,000 hashes to find a block on average.  Say at 1,000 difficulty it would require 4,294,967,296,000 (2^32 * 1,000) hashes to find a block and that block has a 99.999% chance of being the base coins.  Now why wouldn't you just calculate an additional 10,000 merkle trees (a million hashes at most), throw away the ones which don't produce a super block and only use the "super" merkle trees.  It will still take you 4,294,967,296,000 hashes to find a block but when you do it will be worth 250x as much.  

You are adding <0.001% additional work and getting 250x as many coins.  Nobody would mine any other way.   If it didn't happen initially it would as difficulty rises.  The number of coinbase calculations required to find a "super" merkle tree remains the same however the number of total hashes necessary to solve a block rise linearly with difficulty.  So the profit from the exploit would rise with difficulty. 

[jackjack]

Either you're forgetting that changing the merkletree changes the block hash, or I'm really tired and can't understand what you're saying.
I'll come back and read it again after a good night. Not like Vlad, I swear!

[coinerd]

Um you are forgetting that one can use the same coinbase multiple times.  You wouldn't find a "winning" coinbase/merkle tree and then try one hash and throw it away.    It takes a lot more than 10,000 hashes to find a block on average.  Say at 1,000 difficulty it would require 4,294,967,296,000 (2^32 * 1,000) hashes to find a block and that block has a 99.999% chance of being the base coins.  Now why wouldn't you just calculate an additional 10,000 merkle trees (a million hashes at most), throw away the ones which don't produce a super block and only use the "super" merkle trees.  It will still take you 4,294,967,296,000 hashes to find a block but when you do it will be worth 250x as much.  

You are adding <0.001% additional work and getting 250x as many coins.  Nobody would mine any other way.   If it didn't happen initially it would as difficulty rises.  The number of coinbase calculations required to find a "super" merkle tree remains the same however the number of total hashes necessary to solve a block rise linearly with difficulty.  So the profit from the exploit would rise with difficulty. 

this is confusing me too.

You can't find a "winning" hash and then change the merkle root for the block you invalidate your hash.

I'm not sure what you mean by coinbase, the wallet address?  But, same same.  If you change the contents of the block the hash changes.

it sounds like you are talking about swapping out the merkle root or "coinbase" instead of the nonce?

[DeathAndTaxes]

Either you're forgetting that changing the merkletree changes the block hash, or I'm really tired and can't understand what you're saying.
I'll come back and read it again after a good night. Not like Vlad, I swear!

Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying but if the super block is based on the merkle root hash that will be KNOWN before you attempt to solve a block.

i.e.
solve coinbases until you find a super merkle root hash AND THEN
only using "super merkle root hashes" mine normally.

The time to solve a block will be normal and you will always have a super block.

[coinerd]

Either you're forgetting that changing the merkletree changes the block hash, or I'm really tired and can't understand what you're saying.
I'll come back and read it again after a good night. Not like Vlad, I swear!

Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying but if the super block is based on the merkle root hash that will be KNOWN before you attempt to solve a block.

i.e.
solve coinbases until you find a super merkle root hash AND THEN
only using "super merkle root hashes" mine normally.

The time to solve a block will be normal and you will always have a super block.

Now I see what you're saying.

There's still no guarantee that the transactions you have available can be assigned into a "super merkle" root though.

[jackjack]

Oh yeah it was the first proposal to use only the merkleroot, but just after I said it would be better to use the hash of the current block instead

[DeathAndTaxes]

Either you're forgetting that changing the merkletree changes the block hash, or I'm really tired and can't understand what you're saying.
I'll come back and read it again after a good night. Not like Vlad, I swear!

Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying but if the super block is based on the merkle root hash that will be KNOWN before you attempt to solve a block.

i.e.
solve coinbases until you find a super merkle root hash AND THEN
only using "super merkle root hashes" mine normally.

The time to solve a block will be normal and you will always have a super block.

Now I see what you're saying.

There's still no guarantee that the transactions you have available can be assigned into a "super merkle" root though.

Of course it can.  The coinbase has an extra nonce field, simply increment that and check if the it produces a super merkle root.  If the odds of a super block are say 1 in 200 it will take on average 200 attempts and you would have a "super merkle".  Now just that super merkle exclusively using nonces and timestamps to produce a hash.  If/when you find a block it will ALWAYS be a super block.

Given that "exploit" nobody would mine any other way. 

[DeathAndTaxes]

Oh yeah it was the first proposal to use only the merkleroot, but just after I said it would be better to use the hash of the current block instead.

Oops missed that. That probably is not exploitable. Still I think variable rewards are really just a useless gimmick.   Today if you want a small chance of a massive reward you can solo mine Bitcoin ... except nobody does it because it is lower risk to accept a high chance of a smaller reward in a pool.

[xan_The_Dragon]

Whats teh deal with the 666 in bounties? really?

[jackjack]

Oh yeah it was the first proposal to use only the merkleroot, but just after I said it would be better to use the hash of the current block instead.

Oops missed that. That probably is not exploitable. Still I think variable rewards are really just a useless gimmick.   Today if you want a small chance of a massive reward you can solo mine Bitcoin ... except nobody does it because it is lower risk to accept a high chance of a smaller reward in a pool.

I disagree. It's God's choice.

[markm]

Remember that the normal way to rape a coin is to jump on it with many many times as much hashing power than it has before you gangbang it.

If you just do a normal gangbang you rake in blocks fast but each block brings closer the adjustment of difficulty or in some coins each block has a difficulty adjustment immediately.

So instead of coming in with 100 times as many hashes as were there and mining 100 blocks as fast as normally one block is mined, which could cause the difficulty to change making you less able to rape the coin, wouldn't it make sense to to spend, say, 100 times as long on each block, trying to make it a 250-times-reward block? You'd go through less blocks thus have less impact on the difficulty thus be able to rape it for more coins...

Even if you had 250 times as much hashing power as was there before, wouldn't it be worth spending 249 times as long on each block trying to make it a times-250 reward block?

-MarkM-

[jackjack]

I totally agree. The whole concept of super blocks is pain stupid. Sadly for vgb we can't argue against God's will.

[twobits]

* The completion of the one true VGB protocol:  code updates, code reviews!, new binaries, etc, (and with a suggested switchover of no earlier then block 6666)

I commited the code markm came up with while we had a tired banter the other day.  Has two tweeks from the last he posted,  one to change the seed, the other to change the starting block.

https://bitbucket.org/mytwobits/nuggets/commits/c10a55b8c1718d8ae428885d10dc53aa2a1f496d

If no one sees any issues with it I will build up some binaries  a bit later.

I thought for a moment there was an issue with not doing a else for the 0 award blocks #3 to 249.  But I was wrong.  I see that it'd just pass through the if statement and return the initialized setting of int64 nSubsidy = 0 * COIN.   Seems OK.

All right then,  made a binary of it.

https://app.box.com/s/blhmif79kih317yqjm7a

Lets see what God does with it.

[iGotSpots]

Why are you guys even wasting your time with him anymore? Its not even funny anymore, its just really sad that he shares the same dna as us

[jackjack]

Why are you guys even wasting your time with him anymore? Its not even funny anymore, its just really sad that he shares the same dna as us

We're are still having fun
If you aren't then stop posting here and just support your copycatcoin

[hotcoldcoin]

Whats teh deal with the 666 in bounties? really?

really?  you really want to know the deal?   There is no deal, just bat shit craziness.  We follow the lead of the most bat shit crazy person around here these days, and He says that GOD numbers are the way to go.  

[hotcoldcoin]

Why are you guys even wasting your time with him anymore? Its not even funny anymore, its just really sad that he shares the same dna as us

We're are still having fun
If you aren't then stop posting here and just support your copycatcoin

Have to agree here, we're still having fun!     

Don't forget to drop me a nugget address, iGotSpots, because you won one of the bounties, and 666.666 NUG is awaiting you!

[hotcoldcoin]

* The completion of the one true VGB protocol:  code updates, code reviews!, new binaries, etc, (and with a suggested switchover of no earlier then block 6666)

I commited the code markm came up with while we had a tired banter the other day.  Has two tweeks from the last he posted,  one to change the seed, the other to change the starting block.

https://bitbucket.org/mytwobits/nuggets/commits/c10a55b8c1718d8ae428885d10dc53aa2a1f496d

If no one sees any issues with it I will build up some binaries  a bit later.

I thought for a moment there was an issue with not doing a else for the 0 award blocks #3 to 249.  But I was wrong.  I see that it'd just pass through the if statement and return the initialized setting of int64 nSubsidy = 0 * COIN.   Seems OK.

All right then,  made a binary of it.

https://app.box.com/s/blhmif79kih317yqjm7a

Lets see what God does with it.

Oh the joy!   What rapture!     VGB in all its glory.   You realize this means you are the winner of Vlad's 0.25 BTC bounty?    Don't worry, I'm sure he'll send it soon.  Right after he goes to bed.

Until then, I grant thee 4444 NUG more for your actions, and markm 2222 NUG more for his part in this lolzy affair.

[hotcoldcoin]

Trying the new version 1.0.1 windows binary ( https://app.box.com/s/blhmif79kih317yqjm7a ) and all is working as expected.   Even mined a block, just for the hell of it.

We're at block 3720 now, so we have a bit to go before switchover at block 6677.   Enough time for people to decide if they want to join in the fun, and for Vlad to post more interesting and enlightening nuggets of wisdom.

[jackjack]

I think Vlad is sleeping