[ANNOUNCE] Tenebrix, a CPU-friendly, GPU-hostile cryptocurrency

[cyberlync]

So now the big question.

Who would like to buy 250TBX and how much would you be willing to spend? (in BTC's).
Thought I would ask, since I haven't seen anyone else doing it yet.

edit: 0.2BTC for 250TBX seems slightly too low for me, but thanks for making an offer

[racerguy]

i'd be willing to spend 0.2btc, can't atm because i'm still waiting for someone to take my $5.6 buy offer on wbx 

[caish5]

We had hyperthreading disabled when i did that first number.

Just installed ubuntu on the i7

1.3 per thread or 10.4 k/hash with HT
2.6 per thread HT disabled

Definitely an improvement in linux.

[navigator]

WTT: 1375TBX for BTC
any offers?

[terrytibbs]

I'd like to trade 2,965.00 TBX for BTC. Offers!

[racerguy]

Anyone thinking of busting out a mining pool?  Block generation is starting to get a little barren.

[coblee]

Pool will be nice. But I think difficulty will actually go down the next time.

[phelix]

- coins I hold will always suffer from inflation

Now this inflation argument is incredibly weird.

Not only do terms inflation/deflation mean things that do not directly apply to infinitely divisible (and also infinitely re-nominable) abstract mathematical constructs (thus rendering the entire branch of discussion pretty moot), but you seem to completely ignore the fact that stable output means that relative increase in "amount" of coins will be on a constant decline.

By the way, ironically, that is exactly the way everyone's favorite "deflationary" commodity, gold, behaves in real life (you see, presence of abstract theoretical limit to gold extraction from a planet does not really affect market behavior of gold in real life within the planning scope equal to our expected lifespan, which I hope we can agree is the largest reasonable timeframe to plan for   )

Oh, wait a moment, gold production  per annum has actually grown since 1990s. Holy shit, Tenebrix is more "deflationary" than gold (that is, if you believe abstract constructs spawned by eldritch mathematications can really be "deflationary" in the usual sense  )

Also, you seem to ignore natural losses.

You know what ? I will implement some namecoinish coin-purging trick (without demurrage and/or mining rate decrease, of course, principles are principles) just so that when the next deflation guy pops up, I'll just link him to that line of code on github and be done with it  

- sooner or later network hashrate will drop and tenebrix will freeze orphaned as namecoin

Namecoin orphaned ? You must not have been paying attention, mate.

Also, what do ya suggest, crazy skewed retargets, lol ?  

will be dominated by FPGAs   (Why would ArtForz design such a thing...  hmmm....)

Do you have any shred of an idea just how much a good FPGA (just the raw hardware, not R&D costs and shenanigans) costs ?

If it becomes lucrative to mine Tenebrix with dedicated hardware like that, that means Tenebrix is a success.

Also, it is questionable whether FPGA implementation will actually outperform CPU of comparable price (or perhaps, a private pool of cpu miners, at that kind of price ), and by what margin, in terms of raw performance (not in terms of per watt performance, lol)

btw: anyone made the big start money this time?

Depends on how you define money  :-P

But on the other hand, some people implement things that are most favorably described as "sovereign bonds", for the love of Cthulhu  

sorry, did not mean to upset you. or are you only playing the role of the mad professor?

[inflation]
I thought about it and now agree with you it is more of a psychological problem.

How is divisibility of a thing related to it being able to inflate/deflate? Gold is pretty divisible.

I would not call gold it deflationary.

Don't you think losses can be neglected for discussion?


[stall]
Maybe orphaned was the wrong word. But namecoin has been going very slow for quite a while now. Could something this happen to Tenebrix any less than to Bitcoin?

My suggestion to this problem was to use the bitcoin block height for retarget timing.


[FPGAs]

will be dominated by FPGAs   (Why would ArtForz design such a thing...  hmmm....)

Do you have any shred of an idea just how much a good FPGA (just the raw hardware, not R&D costs and shenanigans) costs ?

yo kiddin?

[...]
Being  FPGA and ASIC hostile is harder, given their flexibility, though frankly, if someone, at some point in time, will be willing to throw that kind of money and engineering skillz at mining Tenebix, that already makes Tenebrix a success
[...]

maybe I read too much between the lines here...

Also, it is questionable whether FPGA implementation will actually outperform CPU of comparable price (or perhaps, a private pool of cpu miners, at that kind of price ), and by what margin, in terms of raw performance (not in terms of per watt performance, lol)

this means that if tenebrix would become a big success it might be dominated by fpgas because they are much more power efficient?


[new stuff]

Thus, Tenebrix, should it succeed and achieve popularity, will lead to overall calmer, milder internet for all

Are you sure about that? would it not be much more lucrative to run a botnet?



don't get me wrong, I think Tenebrix is a good idea. also i think it will become successful simply because pretty much everybody has a CPU. also it is very easy for miners to add to rigs.

Actually I am thinking about setting up a stats page. Hope there will be an exchange soon.

[Winnopeg]

OK, repeat question ... but generalised this time.
Anyone know where to find the autogen.sh, configure or Makefile missing from in https://github.com/Lolcust/Tenebrix
It has none - that link is the link in the first post for source and yet I guess some people have compiled this on linux.
(yes I can go and grab the files from bitcoin - but why have a git source without the compile files?)
I guess you all got the source from somewhere else? (not the place listed in the first post)

those files are not missing, those files will be created when you run the required commands to build the client or the miner.
I think you are confusing Tenebrix and Tenebrix-miner

cd  to a directory you like to use for building your stuff from source

Code:

$ git clone https://github.com/Lolcust/Tenebrix 

$cd Tenebix 

I use another terminal window to read help files
(you are still in Thenebix directory)

Code:

$ cat README.rst 

make sure you have all the required stuff installed

Lets build the client.

Code:

$ qmake 
$ make

as a result now you have a 'bitcoin-qt' and you can run it:

Code:

$ ./bitcoin-qt 

If you are asking about Tenebrix-miner:

Code:

$ git clone https://github.com/Lolcust/Tenebrix-miner
$ cd Tenebrix-miner
$ cat README
...
$ ./autogen.sh   

if this has no errors, run:

Code:

$ CFLAGS="-O3 -Wall -msse2" ./configure

and finally:

Code:

$ make 

Start you CLIENT and then run the miner.

Nice walkthrough. Downloading the zip from github (clearly I'm not a linux person) I couldn't get it to compile, so I followed your steps and used the git app. I think the client compiled, but when I try to run it I get this:

Code:

x@x:~/Downloads/Tenebrix$ ./bitcoin-qt
bitcoin-qt: src/main.cpp:1754: bool LoadBlockIndex(bool): Assertion `block.hashMerkleRoot == uint256("0x4e77ffdc1baa20ffffab9d901f418f7496b2a710e462ac4047accdb8b3b774f9")' failed.
Aborted

Anyone know what's up? The Windows binary runs great on Vista & 7, but I'm curious as to what my ailing netbook running Ubuntu can do.

[ineededausername]

If people are buying tbx, I can sell 880...
0.0025btc/tbx min.

[racerguy]

fwiw i get the same error message as winnopeg. Also the deb i try to build is only 15kb and doesn't include any executables.

[EskimoBob]

Nice walkthrough. Downloading the zip from github (clearly I'm not a linux person) I couldn't get it to compile, so I followed your steps and used the git app. I think the client compiled, but when I try to run it I get this:

Code:

x@x:~/Downloads/Tenebrix$ ./bitcoin-qt
bitcoin-qt: src/main.cpp:1754: bool LoadBlockIndex(bool): Assertion `block.hashMerkleRoot == uint256("0x4e77ffdc1baa20ffffab9d901f418f7496b2a710e462ac4047accdb8b3b774f9")' failed.
Aborted

Anyone know what's up? The Windows binary runs great on Vista & 7, but I'm curious as to what my ailing netbook running Ubuntu can do.

did you copy the config to file?

Code:

$ cat README.rst 
Tenebrix - a cryptocurrency with solid stance in favor of CPU and against GPU
PoW based on scrypt

Based on multicoin-QT

ATTENTION!!!
[b]DON'T FORGET TO PLACE tenebrix.conf into your[/b] [s]APPDATA or default tenebrix folder (%APPDATA%\tenebrix on Win,[/s] [b]~/.tenebrix/ on Unixes[/b])

Probably not

now you really owe me a 25 tbrix

[racerguy]

after copying the conf file over i still get error messages

<unknown>: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.


************************
EXCEPTION: N5boost12interprocess14lock_exceptionE       
boost::interprocess::lock_exception       
bitcoin in ThreadSocketHandler()       

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'boost::interprocess::lock_exception'
  what():  boost::interprocess::lock_exception

[eldentyrell]

Please forgive me if this post contains ignorance or stupidity...

It sounds like the basic concept underlying scypt is the ROMmix algorithm: let H(n) = hash(hash(hash(...(message))) where there are "n" occurrences of "hash".  Then you compute H(H(H(...(message)))).  The idea is that the fastest way to compute this is that whenever you calculate H(m) you cache all of the H(n)'s for n<m that you had to produce in the process of building H(m).  Therefore the process is memory-bounded rather than compute-bounded.

Right now people are afraid that we'll get to the point where the only way to mine bitcoins efficiently is to build a gigantic PCB covered in tiles of FPGAs (or maybe ASICs).  Won't this just change the situation so that the most efficient way to mine scypt-coins is to build a gigantic PCB covered in tiles of SRAM chips (or DRAMs if you're working on enough blocks in parallel and pipeline your requests)?  Six of one, half-dozen of the other...

So is Tenebrix "GPU-hostile" but not "custom-hardware-hostile"?

(Personally I think it'd be kinda fun to build a massive sheet-of-ram-chips board, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining).

[Lolcust]

I've been trying to run it on EC2 with limited success. I am a EC2 newbie. I just used the Windows version (even though I am mining on Linux at home) as it would be easier to install the binaries and get up and running faster. It does mine but the hash rate is pretty slow and about half what I am getting at home. I picked a fairly low end configuration though and have only tried 2 threads so far.

The application does start and get connections and downloads blocks but the window seems to lock up and go all transparent.

If I actually knew what I was doing and my synapses made awesome connections much faster I may have tried to get this going last night (instead
of setting it up on my Linux box) and then used EC2 to cluster mine the crap out of this baby.

My assumption though is that if this works other people are already doing it and that may explain why my block rate decreased quite a lot since last night when I first started mining.

Occasional windows "transparent and unresponsive" appear to be a glitch (strongly related to processor load tho). Click on the icon in the tray to un-freeze the thing.

I wonder how EC would do, lol

sorry, did not mean to upset you. or are you only playing the role of the mad professor?

A little bit from colon A, a little bit from B

While partially my response is in jest, you are thirty first person who bothered to inform me that Geist and / or Tenebrix have an "inflation" issue and that it's bad, and that cutting miner subsidy is teh ossom.

At first it leads to interesting discussion about what inflation and deflation are, and whether it is likely that there will be a miner freak-out at first or second "subsidy kink".

At thirty-first it starts getting mildly weird. I do think about writing a large entry for the FAQ i can link people to, because honestly, there's only so many times I can run through same arguments, I'm not an argument-based PoW cruncher

And now that I think of it, I do have a distinct idea as to how to implement an additional "quasi deflationary" influence without cutting subsidies or implementing demurrage.

[inflation]
I thought about it and now agree with you it is more of a psychological problem.

Good, good

How is divisibility of a thing related to it being able to inflate/deflate? Gold is pretty divisible.[inflation]

As far as physical commodities (and to a lesser extent, physical money) go, divisibility does affect the behavior of a system strongly dependent upon said physical construct as a form of money for transaction.

While gold is pretty divisible (compared to diamonds it indeed is ), I think you would agree that paying people in little pieces of gold  0.00001 grams each would be troublesome and incur additional cost of precision equipment needed.

Also, you should bear in mind that so far, we are conflating (woefully so) growth of money mass (monetary inflation) and inflation proper (which only deals with prices, not amount of money in a system).

Inflation / deflation as typically described in the context of Keynesian and Austrian arguments typically assume artifacts that can't just move a decimal point in arbitrary direction at a drop of a hat, which x-coins  are capable of without much trouble (not to mention both assume a nation-state economy of some sort, which is a whole can o' worms that is completely inapplicable to coin...until USA embraces Tenebrix as legal tender, that is )

I would not call gold it deflationary.

Well, that's a question of definitions

It's not deflationary in the sense that is usually peddled in x-coin talks, but it *can* be deflationary for some very specific economic context

Don't you think losses can be neglected for discussion?

No, especially since in a system with a static monetary output of x units per y of time spent, losses and currency introduction scale differently (losses will scale with userbase and to a lesser extent overall monetary mass, the output remains nominally static while, quite obviously, shrinking relatively)

[stall]
Maybe orphaned was the wrong word. But namecoin has been going very slow for quite a while now. Could something this happen to Tenebrix any less than to Bitcoin?

Tenebrix would suffer less due to faster blocks and faster retargets (two weeks of retarget time is well, pretty damn slooow)

Also, by not having the "must have a card this ossom to really mine" effect it has different adoption dynamics

My suggestion to this problem was to use the bitcoin block height for retarget timing.

Actually, that's pretty nifty on the top of it, that I have to agree with.

Do tell more.

[FPGAs]

will be dominated by FPGAs   (Why would ArtForz design such a thing...  hmmm....)

Do you have any shred of an idea just how much a good FPGA (just the raw hardware, not R&D costs and shenanigans) costs ?

yo kiddin?

Dunno, but your suggestion that someone (ArtForz or anyone else) will throw FPGAs to become a prominent Tenebrix mining suggests either peculiar opinion of costs involved or very large optimism as to Tenebrix price in the immediate future.

maybe I read too much between the lines here...

Probably.

Point is, you need something like LX130T to make a decent scrypt-cruncher, and it isn't particularly cheap and it is still questionable whether it will be that much better than 2-4 cpu-cetnric boxen you could get for that money (and mind you we're not counting R&D needed to get FPGA rolling)

If someone even bothers to try jumping through those hoops, that means that Tenebrix has got pretty damn expensive

this means that if tenebrix would become a big success it might be dominated by fpgas because they are much more power efficient?

That depends on whole bunch of stuff,  on how CPU/FPGA performances will compare "in field", how many CPUs are available (obviously, CPUs will massively outnumber FPGAs), how far one can upgrade Tenebrix PoW without some huge radical effort and so on.

So far, there is no indication that FPGA and / or APU (which seem, by far, the most interesting Tenebrix hardware candidates) will be as superior in TBX mining as GPUs are compared to  CPUs.

Power costs are of course an issue, but that again depends largely on context  

Besides, it's not like PoW can't be upgraded, lol

Are you sure about that? would it not be much more lucrative to run a botnet?.

A tenebrix swarm is better than a DDoS bot swarm hammering your site, or a swarm that hosts/trades/transfers "materials" that may get the owner of the infected machine arrested, methinks.

Especially since you can steal only so many cycles before the user notices that the box is grinding slower and slower and takes measures.

don't get me wrong, I think Tenebrix is a good idea. also i think it will become successful simply because pretty much everybody has a CPU. also it is very easy for miners to add to rigs.

Actually I am thinking about setting up a stats page. Hope there will be an exchange soon.

Thanks.

Exchange is on the way (working on a daemon for them)

@ bigchip (qick add)

If you go custom hardware way and have infinite moneys, you can "just" design one hell of a beefy custom design and "simply" mass-produce it.

But that implies that mining tenebrix would cover the R&D, implementation and operation costs of a huge pile of hardware that can only mine Tenebrix (maybe also brute scrypt-protected passwords, lol)

GPUs can at least run crysis and industrially-useful computations.

Custom-built hardware will likely pretty much crunch scrypt (or whatever PoW is used in TBX at that remote future) real good and...crunch scrypt (or whatever PoW is used in TBX at that remote future) real good

Code:

x@x:~/Downloads/Tenebrix$ ./bitcoin-qt
bitcoin-qt: src/main.cpp:1754: bool LoadBlockIndex(bool): Assertion `block.hashMerkleRoot == uint256("0x4e77ffdc1baa20ffffab9d901f418f7496b2a710e462ac4047accdb8b3b774f9")' failed.
Aborted

Anyone know what's up? The Windows binary runs great on Vista & 7, but I'm curious as to what my ailing netbook running Ubuntu can do.

That error only occurs when people fail to place config right.

So, try

cd ~

mkdir .tenebrix

then place the config in .tenebrix and run again.

after copying the conf file over i still get error messages

<unknown>: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.


************************
EXCEPTION: N5boost12interprocess14lock_exceptionE       
boost::interprocess::lock_exception       
bitcoin in ThreadSocketHandler()       

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'boost::interprocess::lock_exception'
  what():  boost::interprocess::lock_exception

Try setting daemon=0 in the config.

[Bobnova]

The thing is, there are botnets CPU mining bitcoins right now.
That's what kicked off the DDoS attacks, banning botnets.

It's clearly worth it, and doing something simple like using half the available threads would give the botnet operator fantastic income while not rendering them meaningfully more detectable.  They can do both that and the other bad stuff, they are exclusive.
On one hand yeah, they risk loosing that machine that gives 'em 5kh/s, but in doing so they may earn a few thousand bucks via ID theft, or they can just sell the credit card numbers they get without meaningful risk of loosing their tenebrix botnet boxes.

Mainly though, it's worthwhile to CPU mine bitcoins and people are doing it, why on earth wouldn't they do it to tenebrix?
In doing so the difficulty gets ramped way the hell up and profits for people mining legally go down.


This is simply an issue with anything that can be CPU mined meaningfully.
Also don't forget there are GPU capable BTC botnets now, too.

[Lolcust]

The thing is, there are botnets CPU mining bitcoins right now.
That's what kicked off the DDoS attacks, banning botnets.

Poolops banned botnets ?

My oh my, that's both not very wise and technologically hardly sustainable.

It's clearly worth it, and doing something simple like using half the available threads would give the botnet operator fantastic income while not rendering them meaningfully more detectable.  They can do both that and the other bad stuff, they are exclusive.

By involving a miner rig in a DDoS strike you increase the probability of being detected / getting owner in hot water, so the benefit of doing "other stuff" must outweigh risks of miner loss.

That means that some high risk / not so high income activities will be less popular.

On one hand yeah, they risk loosing that machine that gives 'em 5kh/s, but in doing so they may earn a few thousand bucks via ID theft, or they can just sell the credit card numbers they get without meaningful risk of loosing their tenebrix botnet boxes.

Depends on specific economics involved. Where I live, DDoS rent is about  45$/hour for a bot net that is enough to take down a Belorussian governmental site.

If Tenebrix mining gives you  > 45$ / hour with such net, involving it in a DDoS op makes far less sense.

Mainly though, it's worthwhile to CPU mine bitcoins and people are doing it, why on earth wouldn't they do it to tenebrix?
In doing so the difficulty gets ramped way the hell up and profits for people mining legally go down.

Well, on the other hand botnets connected to a diverse set of pools will contribute to Tenebrix's security

As for CPU-ming btc, it makes sense only when you have lots and lots of CPUs and don't pay electricity, and even then it is likely kinda meh due to all the super-duper GPUs

This is simply an issue with anything that can be CPU mined meaningfully.
Also don't forget there are GPU capable BTC botnets now, too.

Well, now they will mine both BTC and TBX, on same box, lol

[Lupus_Yonderboy]

Given that there are 7,700,000 premined coins in this chain and the target is 7200 coins per day (25 coins per block * 12 blocks/hr * 24 hours=7200 coins)...and 7,700,00 / 7200 = 1069 days until the network catches up to the number of premined coins....hmmm 3 years.

[Lolcust]

Given that there are 7,700,000 premined coins in this chain and the target is 7200 coins per day (25 coins per block * 12 blocks/hr * 24 hours=7200 coins)...and 7,700,00 / 7200 = 1069 days until the network catches up to the number of premined coins....hmmm 3 years.

Well, I just got bored of arguing with a bunch of dudes in PM about how much should I premine and decided to use same number (as a matter of fact, same string) I used for Geist

[gmannn]

Given that there are 7,700,000 premined coins in this chain and the target is 7200 coins per day (25 coins per block * 12 blocks/hr * 24 hours=7200 coins)...and 7,700,00 / 7200 = 1069 days until the network catches up to the number of premined coins....hmmm 3 years.

Thanks for checking on this, I had a half hope but now i'm sure this is just another scam chain.