[ANN][BLC] Blakecoin Blake-256 for GPU/FPGA With Merged Mined Pools Stable Net

[cinnamon_carter]

Defer to bluedragon747

He knows a lot more about writing custom code than i do and is by far a more experienced c++ coder

I know a few things, and am learning quickly, my advantage is a strong understanding of cryptography and mathematics.

I did not think of the attack method he brought up, there are so many ways to attack or disrupt a coin network that most people do not really know about, and Blue brings up a good point, it takes literally a few seconds to change the magic numbers as you put your source code together, begore you build your testnet clients ect......


Since it is easy to do why not take that step,  excellent point that it is easier than adding a checkpoint to an updated client.

Not directly unrelated to this but on the topic of new clones coming out.........


I have to wonder what the hell some pepole are thinking when I see so many new coins launched every day most scrypt 1024 based ?

Even more amazing is some of them get hundreds of megahash thrown at them and are abandoned or dead within a few days , no connections,
no working blockchain ect......??

I think some people have just gone mad or crazy or don't know 'what to mine'.

I guess about a year ago when there were still only a few litecoin style clones some people would clone a coin hoping to get it listed at cryptsy as a way to make a few btc.


Those days are gone forever.....people who are 'mining for profit' as they say are complaining now that their big rigs are getting them .02 btc a day on middlecoin or similar switching pools


See for yourself and look at the payouts here on middlecoin they are all public since users use your btc address

http://www.middlecoin.com/allusers.html

note the paid out btc amount is the amount that person has had paid to them 'lifetime' from middlecoin, It is currently running at7.6 gigahash scrypt 1024 mining is pretty dam fast , a lot of people sloshing it up for less than the cost of electricity to run their equipment which may or may not be paid for. 

Photon (and the other projectrs I am involved in) were started by me with the intention of long term support.

I have never designed anything that was aimed at giving either myself or anyone else an opportunity to cash in big just because they started early.

Also I will state that for me the reason my projects like Photon were 'Ninja' launched (without pre ANN and wallets in zip files ect.... ahead of time ) is because it is just not necessary.  Yes it is true some people got some 'easy' mining of Photon in the initial hours it was launched however when you look at the total money supply even now, never mind what it will be a few years from now this little advantage is really none at all. 


The only other step one can take to fairly launch a coin is to make a certain number of initial blocks have a zero or 1 coin block award until everyone hears about it and has a chance to get in and join the party. 

I did not see that necessary here. 


I got a little off topic for Blake Coin here , so my apology to everyone.........

I saw Blake Coin as a standout early on after it's release, you can see my old posts here and at cryptocoin talk.

When gpu mining first came out I worked many hours tweaking different settings for my gpu on both reaper then the cg miner build.

I do not think bitcoin needs to be replaced but there is no harm in a competitive market.

I am honored that BlueDragon gave me his permission to make Photon as a child of Blake Coin and provided his guiding hand.

As the network continues to run and build a following I have many ideas to make Photon (and Blake Coin) more than just 'other coins' on the lists.

the shorter chain will receive a block and reads the block header to check for magic value if the check is passed then it will try to add it to its own chain by checking the merkle which it will fail, end result if it keeps getting blocks from another chain is that the wallet locks up randomly doing these merkle calculations checks, also the pool uses the headers especially in a merge mine setup where you are stuffing multiple headers in the work  

these are the things that get checked
1. height
2. magic value
3. merkle
4. time of block

just using the ports to define a broadcast is asking for someone to use an exploit to freeze the block processing or crash a pool wallet just by using a long chain with same magic value but a different merkle, I will continue to avoid coins that use same magic value and keep recommending to any dev to change it if they use the same as Blakecoin or another known value, if a dev can add a checkpoint they can change the magic value it does add as much security as a checkpoint and avoids random crashes and lock ups of wallet.

in my opinion a good dev is one that supports the coin over a period of time and tries to improve it, a bad dev is one that is around for a few days does not make any improvements then is non contactable and gone  

[1714004791]

1714004791

[bzyzny]

Cinnamon_carter you bring up some interesting points. The flood of new alt coins, most of which are almost direct clones of something else, is hopefully exhausting its trend. Everyone wishes they could recreate the early adopter scenario to get super rich like the early bitcoin adopters did. There's nothing inherently wrong with that desire, but that horse has been beaten to death by now. Too many people have been burned by scammy coin launches, and the hype has died down a bit. What a lot of "business" miners don't seem to realize is that cryptocurrencies are a fractal mirror instance of mass psychology and economics. It takes decades to see the effects of socio-economic shifts on the national/global scale. However, due to the dissolution of time and space barriers caused by the internet, similar trends occur in cryptocurrencies but at a different scale of magnitude and duration. Currently, it is relatively unprofitable to be mining, regardless which coin you choose. This is because we are presently in a recessionary phase in cryptocurrencies, which was triggered by an unsustainable growth period a few months ago. Also, mining has become much more popular and diversified, which has caused the profitability of mining to reach an equilibrium because any discrepancies will be short lived due to free trade. Although it is currently a recessionary phase, it is also an incubating stage. Since it is difficult to find profit in the current cryptocurrency economy, there will be participants failing left and right. Then just like in classic economics, the trend will reverse and the participants who survived will become the leaders. Give it a few months and the excess of worthless clone coins will diminish, and development will gravitate towards a handful of truly worthy candidates.  I strongly feel this is where Blakecoin has positioned itself. Not only is Blakecoin an excellent platform from a technical perspective, but it is also posed to reach maturity during the next growth period of the cryptocurrency economic cycle.

i guess thats a bit of a tangent, but its what i thought about when i read your post

[bzyzny]

Thanks to MystPhysX there is now a Blakecoin-QT wallet for Mac OSX! I have not yet had a chance to test it myself, so it'd help if anyone can pls test it out and give some feed back

http://chainexplorer.info/files/BlakeCoin-Qt.dmg

[ocminer]

Pool for Blakecoin:

https://blake.suprnova.cc

It runs the latest MPOS with all its features including Idle Worker Notifs, two factor Auth etc.
I've got Stratum with Vardiff running on it, I've already found several Blocks while testing so everything should be fine, I just need some testing with higher loads.

You can use kr's latest cgminer and, of source, the FPGA miners too.


Hop in before diff gets higher !

[wax7]

Thanks for the Pool, looks good and it's Working

EDIT: Doesnt getting email for unlooking payout.....   

[kramble]

New bitstream for the ztex 1.15x courtesy of hal7

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ngqeeoehul6x8h/hal7_ztex_ufm1_15d4_2core_v04.bit

Just emailed last 1.15x bitstream for blakecoin, up to 200MHz.

[teknohog]

New bitstream for the ztex 1.15x courtesy of hal7

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ngqeeoehul6x8h/hal7_ztex_ufm1_15d4_2core_v04.bit

Nice, I'm getting 188 and 192 MHz with the auto adjust, close to my 1.15y speeds.

[Lyddite]

New bitstream for the ztex 1.15x courtesy of hal7

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ngqeeoehul6x8h/hal7_ztex_ufm1_15d4_2core_v04.bit

Installed and running on 6 ZTEXes (1.15x) for the last 5+ hours. Averages don't show much difference.
I Haven't tried fine tuning the frequencies though.

v03 is 1.926Gh/s
v04 is 1.942Gh/s

-Lyddite

[ocminer]

Thanks for the Pool, looks good and it's Working

EDIT: Doesnt getting email for unlooking payout.....   

Turned off E-Mail, should be working now

[loaded101]

Hi,

Got a lancelot running at 993Mh/s which seems fast, however comparing it to a GPU running at 2Gh/s, the lancelot shows WU of 10.8 compared to the GPU's 27.7

Comparing these gives an "effective" hashrate of around 780Mh/s for the Lancelot which seems about right. Is there any obvious explanation for the higher hashrate number? I have no experience of FPGA bitcoin mining so I may be missing something simple.

Also are there any significant differences between Lancelot and Icarus boards when mining blakecoin?

Thanks.

[hal7]

New bitstream for the ztex 1.15x courtesy of hal7

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ngqeeoehul6x8h/hal7_ztex_ufm1_15d4_2core_v04.bit

Installed and running on 6 ZTEXes (1.15x) for the last 5+ hours. Averages don't show much difference.
I Haven't tried fine tuning the frequencies though.

v03 is 1.926Gh/s
v04 is 1.942Gh/s

-Lyddite

1942/6= ~323 -> 160-164MHz per chip, which is very low.  I've played 4MHz to 8MHz more on spartan grade 2 clones with older v3 bitstream. With latest bitstream I am able to hit 200MHz without HW on grade 3 chip, with slightly R12/R13 mod.

You can also try manual frequency clocking for each ztex separately to find good settings.

BTW, there were two revisions of original 1.15x with different R12 value, so core voltage differs +/-0.02V.

[kramble]

Got a lancelot running at 993Mh/s which seems fast, however comparing it to a GPU running at 2Gh/s, the lancelot shows WU of 10.8 compared to the GPU's 27.7

Comparing these gives an "effective" hashrate of around 780Mh/s for the Lancelot which seems about right. Is there any obvious explanation for the higher hashrate number? I have no experience of FPGA bitcoin mining so I may be missing something simple.

You didn't say how fast you are clocking the devices  

However the theoretical hash rate is easy to work out. The lancelot has two FPGAs and the blake bitstream for the LX150 (all variants so this applies to CM1 and Ztex too), has two cores each of which produces one hash per clock cycle.

So at, for example, at 200MHz clock you should expect 2 * 2 * 200 = 800MHash/sec
I found the HW error rate a little too high at 200MHz, so I clock mine at 195MHz giving 780MHash/sec theoretical.

The lancelot uses a serial communication protocol which only reports found shares ("golden nonces"), so there is no way that the mining driver (cgminer or the python miner) can know the real hash rate, it can only average the share rate and back-calculate to the hash rate (this is pretty much what the pool will be doing too).

In fact it's worse than this, as cgminer calculates the hash rate from the icarus_timing parameter supplied on the command line, which bears no relationship to the actual clock speed. I recommend using --icarus_timing 1.0=20 which performs a getwork every 2 seconds as the default is too slow for blake and will cause duplication of work. The 1.0 figure is the one used by cgminer for the hash time (in nS) and 1.0 should report as 1000MH/s (which is not dissimilar to your 993MH/s).  The reported average hash rate should be more accurate, but it's not my code so I can't vouch for it.

As to the worker utilization, AFAIR this is shares submitted per second, so should be 2^32 / HashRate which I make to be 5.5 for 780MH/s which doesn't look much your 10.8. EDIT Sorry, that's nonsense, not enough coffee this morning. WU is shares/minute and the expected value is 60 * Hashrate / 2^32 which comes to 10.9 which is pretty much spot on, so I don't need to do this any more:

I suppose I ought to have a play with it myself to see what it's up to. I'll take a look later and run it interactively (I currently run cgminer in background, and while it does log, I don't get the final summary stats as cgminer gets sent a kill message on reboot, which happens a couple of times a day due to a bug in the raspi network stack).

Also are there any significant differences between Lancelot and Icarus boards when mining blakecoin?

Does anyone run this on a real Icarus? It would be useful to hear any reports.

AFAIK the Lancelot has a higher power PSU than the Icarus which allowed higher hashrates on bitcoin, but this should not affect blake as it's less power hungry (unless someone comes up with a better bitstream, there is scope for some improvement with expert attention, possibly even a third core).

Anyway, this was meant to be a quick reply and I've just rambled on, sorry. The bottom line is that 780MHash/sec as reported by the pool is perfectly acceptable for a Lancelot clocked at 195MHz.

[tylerderden]

Cinnamon_carter you bring up some interesting points. The flood of new alt coins, most of which are almost direct clones of something else, is hopefully exhausting its trend. Everyone wishes they could recreate the early adopter scenario to get super rich like the early bitcoin adopters did. There's nothing inherently wrong with that desire, but that horse has been beaten to death by now. Too many people have been burned by scammy coin launches, and the hype has died down a bit. What a lot of "business" miners don't seem to realize is that cryptocurrencies are a fractal mirror instance of mass psychology and economics. It takes decades to see the effects of socio-economic shifts on the national/global scale. However, due to the dissolution of time and space barriers caused by the internet, similar trends occur in cryptocurrencies but at a different scale of magnitude and duration. Currently, it is relatively unprofitable to be mining, regardless which coin you choose. This is because we are presently in a recessionary phase in cryptocurrencies, which was triggered by an unsustainable growth period a few months ago. Also, mining has become much more popular and diversified, which has caused the profitability of mining to reach an equilibrium because any discrepancies will be short lived due to free trade. Although it is currently a recessionary phase, it is also an incubating stage. Since it is difficult to find profit in the current cryptocurrency economy, there will be participants failing left and right. Then just like in classic economics, the trend will reverse and the participants who survived will become the leaders. Give it a few months and the excess of worthless clone coins will diminish, and development will gravitate towards a handful of truly worthy candidates.  I strongly feel this is where Blakecoin has positioned itself. Not only is Blakecoin an excellent platform from a technical perspective, but it is also posed to reach maturity during the next growth period of the cryptocurrency economic cycle.

i guess thats a bit of a tangent, but its what i thought about when i read your post

best post I have read all day +1

[mozurt]

would be silly to sell at those prices  

but Bitcoin was also worth very little $ per BTC at one point so time will tell  

Anyone want a pizza only 10,000 BLC  

Why Blakecoin beats other coins in the long run:

• The reward for mining Blakecoin does Not decrease over time it only increases with block height and difficulty
• No restriction on any platform as Blakecoin does not include artificial *Security* that slows down possible mining hash rate and reduces power efficiency
• Already has planned use for Blakecoin as a currency storage between MMO systems with prototypes in development
• The modified blake-256 algorithm hash rate is just under 3x faster on the GPU and just over 2x on the FPGA compared with Bitcoin

this is going to take time but here is the early schedule:

MOOC - due for testing ~ Q1/Q2 2014 (some courses will be free and some will be Blakecoin/£/€/$)
virtual learning so you can lean how to make games and see how we make games, new courses will be added on a ongoing basis

MMOFPS - due for closed beta ~ Q2 2014: 60% done

bit too early for these to be correct!:

MMOFPS - due for open beta ~ Q3 2014

MMORPG - due for closed beta ~ Q3/Q4 2014: 30% done

so by the end of 2014 Blakecoin should be well known at least to gamers and students


Edit:

working on Blakecoin version 0.8.9 atm porting the changes from Bitcoin 0.8.6 and updating the checkpoints so should be out soon

still waiting MMOFPS / MMORPG

[BlueDragon747]

still waiting MMOFPS / MMORPG

Still working on it been delayed a bit due to merge mining work

I had some meetings this week about FPS game release and progress is still on track should have some videos of the game play soon  

the RPG has at least a 6-8 week lag on the FPS atm so no eta

Merge Mining news:

some wallet code has been changed for the merge mining, testing this weekend hope to have a new update to the wallet by next weekend, MPOS for multicoin is still broken and the payout for aux coin is non functional atm still work in progress  

Other news:

got a better fmax on the 3 core Lancelot fpga build I had on the side still lower fmax than the 2 core but overall higher throughput ~960MH/s-1GH/s at 160MHz-165MHz which is about max blakecoin.org/blakeminer_FourGatexClk_3core_fmax-102.bit

no luck on getting Xilinx ISE 14.7 to build a 3 core version for the Ztex 1.15y or the CM1  

[kramble]

got a better fmax on the 3 core Lancelot fpga build I had on the side still lower fmax than the 2 core but overall higher throughput ~960MH/s-1GH/s at 160MHz-165MHz which is about max blakecoin.org/blakeminer_FourGatexClk_3core_fmax-102.bit

no luck on getting Xilinx ISE 14.7 to build a 3 core version for the Ztex 1.15y or the CM1  

Nice one. Getting 160MHz here with WU of around 12 to 13 so it's a definite improvement.

I'll pop the bitstream up on the github (I assume the link to blakecoin.org will be OK, else I can put up a copy on my dropbox account).

Yeah on the Xilinx toolchain. It's really frustrating when you just can't get it to route at all, so I basically gave up on it  

[BlueDragon747]

got a better fmax on the 3 core Lancelot fpga build I had on the side still lower fmax than the 2 core but overall higher throughput ~960MH/s-1GH/s at 160MHz-165MHz which is about max blakecoin.org/blakeminer_FourGatexClk_3core_fmax-102.bit

no luck on getting Xilinx ISE 14.7 to build a 3 core version for the Ztex 1.15y or the CM1  

Nice one. Getting 160MHz here with WU of around 12 to 13 so it's a definite improvement.

I'll pop the bitstream up on the github (I assume the link to blakecoin.org will be OK, else I can put up a copy on my dropbox account).

Yeah on the Xilinx toolchain. It's really frustrating when you just can't get it to route at all, so I basically gave up on it  

should be fine you are most welcome to add the link to your github  

Yeah using the Xilinx toolchain does take some of the fun out of it, I still put a build on once a week with slight tweaks and different seed values but its mostly disappointing or never finishes    

my boards here
Lancelot 1:  --cainsmore-clock 165 -Q 4 = ~14 WU
Lancelot 2:  --cainsmore-clock 160 -Q 4 = ~13 WU

[bzyzny]

BlueDragon747, thanks for the status update, its reassuring to hear progress is being made behind the scenes. Nice trick there squeezing more megahashes out of the fpgas.

I was curious how you are implementing multiple coins in MPOS. Will it be a plugin system so pool operators can choose which blockchains to mine, and can miners choose which they participate in? I would imagine there might be a limit to how many blockchains can be concurrently merge mined, either from a limitation of MPOS, eliopool, or some technical parameter. If each aux chain has to insert a code into the Blakecoin blockchain, how many would it take to exceed the max file size of a block? Not sure if im asking the right questions but u get the idea

[BlueDragon747]

BlueDragon747, thanks for the status update, its reassuring to hear progress is being made behind the scenes. Nice trick there squeezing more megahashes out of the fpgas.

I was curious how you are implementing multiple coins in MPOS. Will it be a plugin system so pool operators can choose which blockchains to mine, and can miners choose which they participate in? I would imagine there might be a limit to how many blockchains can be concurrently merge mined, either from a limitation of MPOS, eliopool, or some technical parameter. If each aux chain has to insert a code into the Blakecoin blockchain, how many would it take to exceed the max file size of a block? Not sure if im asking the right questions but u get the idea

no other pool operators have offered to help with this so its up to me atm  

I think a plugin system is off due to time constraints and some of the merge is hard coded as it is for most merge mine pools, its still going to be tricky for other pool operators to setup, this I am quite sure as it has been that way for me so far  

no issues with max size of block but there is a limit to the size of the work header with this method of merging I would guess it might have issues >6 Aux coins without changing some stuff in miner/eloipool, there is another way to merge mine by just using the nonce and submitting it to the wallet to solve this is far more flexible for large merge but slightly more random/out of order finds and is a little more difficult to work out shares and payouts it is also heavy load for the wallets, atm the issue is mostly with the front end of the pool so not going to play with this until its needed e.g 6+ aux coins merged, MPOS is a PITA to mod and I may look into doing something more basic if I keep getting issues (which I do even on normal BLC pools)  

Edit Note:
eloipool handles: blockchains(with MMP), worker shares, current/new work, blocks, difficulty, submissions etc. to the miner/wallet and then it saves the worker shares in the DB, most of this is set in the config or hard coded in MMP and will work regardless of MPOS.

MPOS does the rest of what you see calculates all stats, payouts for shares, all the user stuff and it detects if eloipool found a block but it has very few direct interaction with the actual pool software(eloipool) most of the time it is working directly with the wallet (multisend and other api calls) or uses the DB and reads the shares table that eloipool is saving too

the current pool configuration is like a layered system with MPOS working on top of the service eloipool provides hence why you can use any worker name for cgminer and it will accept them as eloipool does not check the worker exists in DB it only uses the shares table so you will only get credited for shares if you first set the worker up within MPOS

for chain swapping you would run some sort of custom cronjob its not something you would do in MPOS and the Aux chains are set in MMP and hard coded so could only really change the main chain by stopping and starting another eloipool with a different config/chain, not very useful atm only useful if you wanted to do multipool + merge mining

I have not finished the merge mining yet and still quite a few bugs to solve, I am testing some new code this weekend hope it works ok  

Effect of the Real World:
My time is split between working on any contract work (IT Consulting/Management) and the projects I am working on BLC/Games etc. the rest of the time is just spent eating, sleeping and other every day stuff, I don't have any big investors helping with any costs so all my projects are self funded atm

[ahmed_bodi]

BlueDragon747, thanks for the status update, its reassuring to hear progress is being made behind the scenes. Nice trick there squeezing more megahashes out of the fpgas.

I was curious how you are implementing multiple coins in MPOS. Will it be a plugin system so pool operators can choose which blockchains to mine, and can miners choose which they participate in? I would imagine there might be a limit to how many blockchains can be concurrently merge mined, either from a limitation of MPOS, eliopool, or some technical parameter. If each aux chain has to insert a code into the Blakecoin blockchain, how many would it take to exceed the max file size of a block? Not sure if im asking the right questions but u get the idea

no other pool operators have offered to help with this so its up to me atm  

I think a plugin system is off due to time constraints and some of the merge is hard coded as it is for most merge mine pools, its still going to be tricky for other pool operators to setup, this I am quite sure as it has been that way for me so far  

no issues with max size of block but there is a limit to the size of the work header with this method of merging I would guess it might have issues >6 Aux coins without changing some stuff in miner/eloipool, there is another way to merge mine by just using the nonce and submitting it to the wallet to solve this is far more flexible for large merge but slightly more random/out of order finds and is a little more difficult to work out shares and payouts it is also heavy load for the wallets, atm the issue is mostly with the front end of the pool so not going to play with this until its needed e.g 6+ aux coins merged, MPOS is a PITA to mod and I may look into doing something more basic if I keep getting issues (which I do even on normal BLC pools)  

Edit Note:
eloipool handles: blockchains(with MMP), worker shares, current/new work, blocks, difficulty, submissions etc. to the miner/wallet and then it saves the worker shares in the DB, most of this is set in the config or hard coded in MMP and will work regardless of MPOS.

MPOS does the rest of what you see calculates all stats, payouts for shares, all the user stuff and it detects if eloipool found a block but it has very few direct interaction with the actual pool software(eloipool) most of the time it is working directly with the wallet (multisend and other api calls) or uses the DB and reads the shares table that eloipool is saving too

the current pool configuration is like a layered system with MPOS working on top of the service eloipool provides hence why you can use any worker name for cgminer and it will accept them as eloipool does not check the worker exists in DB it only uses the shares table so you will only get credited for shares if you first set the worker up within MPOS

for chain swapping you would run some sort of custom cronjob its not something you would do in MPOS and the Aux chains are set in MMP and hard coded so could only really change the main chain by stopping and starting another eloipool with a different config/chain, not very useful atm only useful if you wanted to do multipool + merge mining

I have not finished the merge mining yet and still quite a few bugs to solve, I am testing some new code this weekend hope it works ok  

Effect of the Real World:
My time is split between working on any contract work (IT Consulting/Management) and the projects I am working on BLC/Games etc. the rest of the time is just spent eating, sleeping and other every day stuff, I don't have any big investors helping with any costs so all my projects are self funded atm

I'd be willing to help with this as ive always been interested in getting it working. a good idea if you are good with sql is to work out the sql structure (and the configs in use) here: http://github.com/60E/php-mpos

About the worker auth, i have a module in my repo which will get eloipool to use the database to authorise users. Eloipool will also likely need the db query modified to work efficiently with MPOS or you will run into a lot of cron errors (i ran eloipool before i began work on stratum)