BitShares PTS (formerly ProtoShares) Mandatory Upgrade & Snapshot Announcement

[brekyrself]

how to mine solo ? have xeon e1230 or only pool mining for now ? What miner to use ptsminer_avx_intel.exe ,ptsminer_intel.exe,ptsminer_sse4.exe ? tnx for answers

Join a pool, too difficult to mine solo.

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?board=11.0

[jabbaah]

Hi,
There is definitly a GPU Miner for Protoshare so pls either share it or fix the problem because there are cheaters who eat all the coins
thx

Any news on this one?

Any chance to get back to "fair" mining?

[dga]

Hi,
There is definitly a GPU Miner for Protoshare so pls either share it or fix the problem because there are cheaters who eat all the coins
thx

Any news on this one?

Any chance to get back to "fair" mining?

I spent some time over New Years looking at this.  Here's my take:  There's something cool in having a CPU-profitable coin to mine.  If everyone goes GPU, it'll change that.  But at the same time, it does seem like there's at least one private GPU implementation for PTS, which is great for the person who has it, but contributes to their ability to mount a 51% attack on the network.  If you actually care about the coin instead of simply mining, that's a bad thing.  If you just mine, you don't care. :-)  Since you can't put the cat back in the bag, the other option is to let everyone GPU mine.

Which brings us to:

I can write a GPU miner for protoshares.  It'll take some very solid effort on top of the sketch I've already made of how to do it.  I don't really have that time, but I'm willing to do it for a bounty.  I would propose a first-cut CUDA version integrated with some existing miner, in a form that someone like Christian (of CudaMiner) could take and add his auto-tuning magic sauce to to really eke out better performance over time.  Whomever writes the polished version can get compensated for their time by asking for tips on startup or by adding an auto-tipping mechanism similar to the one in yam.  The algorithms will be fairly straightforward to convert to OpenCL code for use on AMD cards, and I'll do a full open source / Apache 2 licensed release of the source code along with documentation.

Are people interested enough to fund this at a level that justifies the time investment?

(To back up my claim a bit, recall that I'm the person who wrote the new-improved Kepler based scrypt mining code for NVidia GPUs, and I seem to have a day job as a Ph.D. computer scientist.  When I say I can write the miner, I'm saying it with absolute certainty.)

  -Dave

[jabbaah]

Hi,
There is definitly a GPU Miner for Protoshare so pls either share it or fix the problem because there are cheaters who eat all the coins
thx

Any news on this one?

Any chance to get back to "fair" mining?

I spent some time over New Years looking at this.  Here's my take:  There's something cool in having a CPU-profitable coin to mine.  If everyone goes GPU, it'll change that.  But at the same time, it does seem like there's at least one private GPU implementation for PTS, which is great for the person who has it, but contributes to their ability to mount a 51% attack on the network.  If you actually care about the coin instead of simply mining, that's a bad thing.  If you just mine, you don't care. :-)  Since you can't put the cat back in the bag, the other option is to let everyone GPU mine.

Which brings us to:

I can write a GPU miner for protoshares.  It'll take some very solid effort on top of the sketch I've already made of how to do it.  I don't really have that time, but I'm willing to do it for a bounty.  I would propose a first-cut CUDA version integrated with some existing miner, in a form that someone like Christian (of CudaMiner) could take and add his auto-tuning magic sauce to to really eke out better performance over time.  Whomever writes the polished version can get compensated for their time by asking for tips on startup or by adding an auto-tipping mechanism similar to the one in yam.  The algorithms will be fairly straightforward to convert to OpenCL code for use on AMD cards, and I'll do a full open source / Apache 2 licensed release of the source code along with documentation.

Are people interested enough to fund this at a level that justifies the time investment?

(To back up my claim a bit, recall that I'm the person who wrote the new-improved Kepler based scrypt mining code for NVidia GPUs, and I seem to have a day job as a Ph.D. computer scientist.  When I say I can write the miner, I'm saying it with absolute certainty.)

  -Dave

Thanks for the open and clear words, Dave. I am absolutely with you. In my opinion it's necessary for the longterm protoshare "health" to implement and release a GPU miner accessible for everyone - given that there already IS a private GPU implementation out there.

The initial statement from Invictus Innovations was that Protoshares will only be CPU mineable. And for every crypto coin (or share) it's necessary to be funded by a motivated mining community. Having a private GPU miner for Protoshares out there in the wild does not improve credibility and motivation. As every crypto depends on trust its community has in it (because it's not backed by physical values like every fiat money... hahaha), it should be desirable for everyone caring about Protoshares to have a fair mining environment.

I think that the current situation of uncertainty regarding the mineability using CPU or GPU may even result in a decreasing exchange rate.

A bounty for developing a GPU miner for Protoshares should be made available. I don't know if Invictus Innovations is the right address for this. Anyway, the current situation is risking the Protoshares reputation.

This is my personal opinion - not necessarily based on facts, so please correct me if I'm wrong ;-)

[smolen]

it does seem like there's at least one private GPU implementation for PTS, which is great for the person who has it, but contributes to their ability to mount a 51% attack on the network.

I have working GPU miner for Protoshares almost from beginning, but it is uselessly slow. I can open source OpenCL implementation of SHA512, if it will help you.

[dga]

it does seem like there's at least one private GPU implementation for PTS, which is great for the person who has it, but contributes to their ability to mount a 51% attack on the network.

I have working GPU miner for Protoshares almost from beginning, but it is uselessly slow. I can open source OpenCL implementation of SHA512, if it will help you.

That part's easy - there's a CUDA implementation of SHA512 in the John the Ripper source with a permissive open source / public domain license.  Already have that running.

What does uselessly slow mean?  Based upon preliminary poking, my guess is that I can write something that will get 500 c/s on a decent card.  It won't be the most amazing thing since sliced bread, but it will be substantially better than a CPU in terms of c/s/w and c/s/$.

(Yes, yes, I know I said I didn't want to put the time in, but I couldn't resist writing a few lines of code as a test before making the offer to write and open source it. :-)

  -Dave

[smolen]

That part's easy - there's a CUDA implementation of SHA512 in the John the Ripper source with a permissive open source / public domain license.  Already have that running.

What does uselessly slow mean?  Based upon preliminary poking, my guess is that I can write something that will get 500 c/s on a decent card.  It won't be the most amazing thing since sliced bread, but it will be substantially better than a CPU in terms of c/s/w and c/s/$.

(Yes, yes, I know I said I didn't want to put the time in, but I couldn't resist writing a few lines of code as a test before making the offer to write and open source it. :-)

  -Dave

Something like 300000 shares/day, that's 300000/2/24/60/60=1.7 collisions per second
My 6770 can only allocate 520MB of memory and have no 64-bit atomics, so I implemented backet sort (using backet number as storage for high bits of the hash ) then uploaded entire memory to CPU and used bloom filter to find duplicates. Well, some day I put my hands on better GPU, but right now they are sold out.

[ReCat]

Hi,
There is definitly a GPU Miner for Protoshare so pls either share it or fix the problem because there are cheaters who eat all the coins
thx

Any news on this one?

Any chance to get back to "fair" mining?

I spent some time over New Years looking at this.  Here's my take:  There's something cool in having a CPU-profitable coin to mine.  If everyone goes GPU, it'll change that.  But at the same time, it does seem like there's at least one private GPU implementation for PTS, which is great for the person who has it, but contributes to their ability to mount a 51% attack on the network.  If you actually care about the coin instead of simply mining, that's a bad thing.  If you just mine, you don't care. :-)  Since you can't put the cat back in the bag, the other option is to let everyone GPU mine.

Which brings us to:

I can write a GPU miner for protoshares.  It'll take some very solid effort on top of the sketch I've already made of how to do it.  I don't really have that time, but I'm willing to do it for a bounty.  I would propose a first-cut CUDA version integrated with some existing miner, in a form that someone like Christian (of CudaMiner) could take and add his auto-tuning magic sauce to to really eke out better performance over time.  Whomever writes the polished version can get compensated for their time by asking for tips on startup or by adding an auto-tipping mechanism similar to the one in yam.  The algorithms will be fairly straightforward to convert to OpenCL code for use on AMD cards, and I'll do a full open source / Apache 2 licensed release of the source code along with documentation.

Are people interested enough to fund this at a level that justifies the time investment?

(To back up my claim a bit, recall that I'm the person who wrote the new-improved Kepler based scrypt mining code for NVidia GPUs, and I seem to have a day job as a Ph.D. computer scientist.  When I say I can write the miner, I'm saying it with absolute certainty.)

  -Dave

Oh god, Here we go again. We're about to get Mtmlr'd

[dga]

Oh god, Here we go again. We're about to get Mtmlr'd

You're probably trolling, but in case you're serious, I'll respond exactly once to this kind of statement.

Unlike the subject of your prior experience, I'm not hiding behind a cloak of anonymity.  I'm a professional, I'm public about this, and I'm posting under my real name.  If you're really curious, here you go:  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/

My recent research is in high performance, memory-efficient algorithms.  You may choose or not choose to believe me, of course.  I could be lying and pretending to be some CS researcher somewhere.  But if you look on my blog or other sources, you should be able to conclude pretty quickly that I'm not.

I'll be blunt, of course, that I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to get compensated for a fun side project that I invested waaaaayyyy more time into over my christmas and new years breaks than I should have.  The miner is now working, I'm running it on my computers at home.  I was running it on EC2 GPU instances for a while (about 600 c/s total across the GPU and CPU), but the spot prices jumped back up to the point where it wasn't profitable.  *shrugs*

If you want to be constructive, how about suggesting some good mechanism of escrow or other approach so that there's only money transferred when people are satisfied that the miner is actually functional?

  -Dave

[jammertr]

Oh god, Here we go again. We're about to get Mtmlr'd

.................
If you want to be constructive, how about suggesting some good mechanism of escrow or other approach so that there's only money transferred when people are satisfied that the miner is actually functional?

  -Dave

There are several well known escrow services in the forums, I'm sure one of those can be of use. However the trick is to agree on "the amount of donation" and "on which condition the funds will be released".
Release of funds can be tied to something like ...  x% of the participants report a successful gpu miner

[dga]

Oh god, Here we go again. We're about to get Mtmlr'd

.................
If you want to be constructive, how about suggesting some good mechanism of escrow or other approach so that there's only money transferred when people are satisfied that the miner is actually functional?

  -Dave

There are several well known escrow services in the forums, I'm sure one of those can be of use. However the trick is to agree on "the amount of donation" and "on which condition the funds will be released".
Release of funds can be tied to something like ...  x% of the participants report a successful gpu miner

Thank you.  I'm unfamiliar with them, so specific recs would be appreciated.  I have some conditions on that - I don't have a windows build box, for example, so I can only test builds on MacOS and Linux x86-64.  And I'm only going to certify that it works on cards that I have access to - Tesla K20c, GTX 650 ti, GT 650M, and GTX 690.  But I want people to know what they're getting.  The delta from "no GPU miner" to "a working GPU miner" is larger than the delta from "have to tweak it to work on Windows or on Fermi".

(Of course, I'd like to *not* be in the position where someone fakes a lot of accounts to claim that it doesn't work when, in fact, it does. :-)

[smolen]

I'm not hiding behind a cloak of anonymity.  I'm a professional, I'm public about this, and I'm posting under my real name.

Just in case, one of reasons for somewhat strange architecture of my own miner were tax laws, I wanted to receive royalties and to avoid being money transmitter or service provider. And your IRS can be much more hostile than tax authorities here in Russia

[dga]

I'm not hiding behind a cloak of anonymity.  I'm a professional, I'm public about this, and I'm posting under my real name.

Just in case, one of reasons for somewhat strange architecture of my own miner were tax laws, I wanted to receive royalties and to avoid being money transmitter or service provider. And your IRS can be much more hostile than tax authorities here in Russia

Oh yes. :-)  That's the other reason I'd rather just get paid up front.  I can call it consulting income, I know how to pay taxes on it, and life is simple.

The good news:  I'm in discussions with bytemaster at protoshares about them sponsoring the release.  Have others had good experiences dealing with them and their bounties?

  -Dave

[smolen]

The good news:  I'm in discussions with bytemaster at protoshares about them sponsoring the release.  Have others had good experiences dealing with them and their bounties?

I don't expect cheating from bytemaster, but even if things go wrong, don't worry, once you'll be recognized here as someone who can get things done, there will be job offers in your inbox

[brekyrself]

I'm not hiding behind a cloak of anonymity.  I'm a professional, I'm public about this, and I'm posting under my real name.

Just in case, one of reasons for somewhat strange architecture of my own miner were tax laws, I wanted to receive royalties and to avoid being money transmitter or service provider. And your IRS can be much more hostile than tax authorities here in Russia

Oh yes. :-)  That's the other reason I'd rather just get paid up front.  I can call it consulting income, I know how to pay taxes on it, and life is simple.

The good news:  I'm in discussions with bytemaster at protoshares about them sponsoring the release.  Have others had good experiences dealing with them and their bounties?

  -Dave

Bytemaster and team have been nothing but up front and honest with their whole project.

Is the miner going to use OpenCL or be cuda specific?

[dga]

I'm not hiding behind a cloak of anonymity.  I'm a professional, I'm public about this, and I'm posting under my real name.

Just in case, one of reasons for somewhat strange architecture of my own miner were tax laws, I wanted to receive royalties and to avoid being money transmitter or service provider. And your IRS can be much more hostile than tax authorities here in Russia

Oh yes. :-)  That's the other reason I'd rather just get paid up front.  I can call it consulting income, I know how to pay taxes on it, and life is simple.

The good news:  I'm in discussions with bytemaster at protoshares about them sponsoring the release.  Have others had good experiences dealing with them and their bounties?

  -Dave

Bytemaster and team have been nothing but up front and honest with their whole project.

Is the miner going to use OpenCL or be cuda specific?

It's CUDA specific.  Should be straightforward for someone to take the idea and port to OpenCL, though.  I just like CUDA. :-)

[electrocat]

Oh god, Here we go again. We're about to get Mtmlr'd

.................
If you want to be constructive, how about suggesting some good mechanism of escrow or other approach so that there's only money transferred when people are satisfied that the miner is actually functional?

  -Dave

There are several well known escrow services in the forums, I'm sure one of those can be of use. However the trick is to agree on "the amount of donation" and "on which condition the funds will be released".
Release of funds can be tied to something like ...  x% of the participants report a successful gpu miner

Thank you.  I'm unfamiliar with them, so specific recs would be appreciated.  I have some conditions on that - I don't have a windows build box, for example, so I can only test builds on MacOS and Linux x86-64.  And I'm only going to certify that it works on cards that I have access to - Tesla K20c, GTX 650 ti, GT 650M, and GTX 690.  But I want people to know what they're getting.  The delta from "no GPU miner" to "a working GPU miner" is larger than the delta from "have to tweak it to work on Windows or on Fermi".

(Of course, I'd like to *not* be in the position where someone fakes a lot of accounts to claim that it doesn't work when, in fact, it does. :-)

I'm very interested in this. I mine on windows with a Titan, and I'd be able to help verify a working GPU miner on my setup.

PS Thanks for optimizations to cudaminer!

[ReCat]

Oh god, Here we go again. We're about to get Mtmlr'd

You're probably trolling, but in case you're serious, I'll respond exactly once to this kind of statement.

Unlike the subject of your prior experience, I'm not hiding behind a cloak of anonymity.  I'm a professional, I'm public about this, and I'm posting under my real name.  If you're really curious, here you go:  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/

My recent research is in high performance, memory-efficient algorithms.  You may choose or not choose to believe me, of course.  I could be lying and pretending to be some CS researcher somewhere.  But if you look on my blog or other sources, you should be able to conclude pretty quickly that I'm not.

I'll be blunt, of course, that I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to get compensated for a fun side project that I invested waaaaayyyy more time into over my christmas and new years breaks than I should have.  The miner is now working, I'm running it on my computers at home.  I was running it on EC2 GPU instances for a while (about 600 c/s total across the GPU and CPU), but the spot prices jumped back up to the point where it wasn't profitable.  *shrugs*

If you want to be constructive, how about suggesting some good mechanism of escrow or other approach so that there's only money transferred when people are satisfied that the miner is actually functional?

  -Dave

I wasn't trolling. I'm really suspicious. But even all credibility and proof in the world can be faked some way. The forum's still full of scammers... don't trust anyone.

I just hope you're as you say, but not even I can say I fully believe you, regardless of the evidence. (How do we know that you're not a random person on the forums taking the name of the person behind that page and the blogs/etc? There's many possible ways to look completely legit while not being that at all.)

[smooth]

I wasn't trolling. I'm really suspicious.

The code is on github now. Suspicion of scammers is reasonable, but at this point, its time to drop it here.

[ReCat]

I wasn't trolling. I'm really suspicious.

The code is on github now. Suspicion of scammers is reasonable, but at this point, its time to drop it here.

I'm not trying to troll. It's just... cant help but feel paranoid. MTMLR was legit too. he made all of reaper, which people actually used!