Bitcoin Client with User Defined Difficulty and Stratum Support?

[os2sam]

When will there be variable or use defined difficulty and stratum support in the Bitcoin client?  It seems it is needed very badly.

[gmaxwell]

When will there be variable or use defined difficulty and stratum support in the Bitcoin client?  It seems it is needed very badly.

I can't actually figure out what you're asking about. Can you try again with some more context, especially please describe what you're trying to accomplish.

[os2sam]

When will there be variable or use defined difficulty and stratum support in the Bitcoin client?  It seems it is needed very badly.

I can't actually figure out what you're asking about. Can you try again with some more context, especially please describe what you're trying to accomplish.

I would be happy provide some context.

Solo mining against the Bitcoin-QT client results in allot of shares being leaked over to backup pools.  So it seems something needs to be done at some point so that folks with high hash rate ASIC's can solo mine without the need to setup there own pool software to do it. 

Currently I have about 20Ghs of ASIC's and when I solo mine I get this behavior.

My thought was to implement the stratum protocol as an option for the mining software to communicate with the Bitcoin Client in server mode.  Right now that is done with the old getwork protocol.

My other thought was to implement variable difficulty, but after thinking about that I realized that was probably silly since, I think, the mining software is only going to submit shares that meet or exceed the current difficulty anyway.

So does that explain what I'm thinking better?
Thanks,
Sam

[gmaxwell]

Solo mining against the Bitcoin-QT client results in allot of shares being leaked over to backup pools.

Ah, you're trying to getwork mine against bitcoin-qt? With an asic miner? Crazy.  Getwork is depricated.

We support getblocktemplate in bitcoind. This is how you should be solo mining against it.

(And yea, vardiff wouldn't make any sense for solo mining. It would only be useful for stats collection, and bitcoind does no stats collection for mining)

[os2sam]

Solo mining against the Bitcoin-QT client results in allot of shares being leaked over to backup pools.

Ah, you're trying to getwork mine against bitcoin-qt? With an asic miner? Crazy.  Getwork is depricated.

We support getblocktemplate in bitcoind. This is how you should be solo mining against it.

So I can just tell my miner to use the GBT protocol?

[Trongersoll]

ummm, What about the ASICminer blades? aren't strictly getwork? Yeah, i know about the stratum proxy. I'm pretty sure that this is about fallback mining solo. If Bitcoin-QT could keep up it would be a help.

[gmaxwell]

So I can just tell my miner to use the GBT protocol?

If it has a sufficiently complete one. Last I checked cgminer's implementation couldn't be used for solo mining but bfgminer could.

ummm, What about the ASICminer blades? aren't strictly getwork? Yeah, i know about the stratum proxy. I'm pretty sure that this is about fallback mining solo. If Bitcoin-QT could keep up it would be a help.

They're not even getwork they're kind of a bastard half implementation of getwork that does things like ignores difficulty and spams results. You really need to use them with some kind of proxy. I believe bfgminer can be used as a proxy for them.