[PULL] remove GUI 'Generate Coins' option

[Pieter Wuille]

Maybe, but that does not mean we want tons of people burning electricity for almost no additional strength to the network.

Unless I am missing something, the current scheme looks flawed to me. It is designed so most of generators would waste electricity!

By waste I mean: earn less than the electricity it costs you. And no, it is not designed to be wasteful in this respect.

Now what am I missing?

The security of the network lies in the fact that you need - on average - to do as much work as was done in generating a part of the chain, to revert that part of the chain to your own version. The difficulty is irrelevant here, its only purpose is to prevent massive stale blocks by people working on different blocks at the same time. The security of the network is only determined by the total hashing speed, and even now, small CPu miners do contribute to that, but that does not mean they should if it is wasteful for them.

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[em3rgentOrdr]

We should add code to spy on how power efficient your mining is.  Then the bitcoin code will report to the nannies at the US government.  Then bitcoin can apply for the US government's "Energy Star" certificate of approval.  Everybody wins! 

[Dusty]

Lots and lots of small clients being much more powerful together than top N miners. All that is needed for that is to allow them to work cooperatively, instead of "who is first - owns the bounty, all the rest just wasted their electricity". I still believe it is designed to waste electricity, because all the work that didn't generated the block by being first, was wasted, not contributed.

And the side effect is that every client will have additional bonus of participating in a sort of lottery to win 50 BTC from time to time

For what I understand, that's exactly how it's working now: since every client has a different block to solve, everybody is working on a different set of hashes and so everybody has the same chance to solve a block.

Even if a single client has very low mining power, a million of those clients are something very powerful anyway, and would help both securing the network and in the intent to not give a few small big pools too much power.

Isn't?

[BitterTea]

The difficulty is a measure of the likelyhood of winning the block lottery with a single hash. The only difference between people who use specific mining software and the Bitcoin software is that the main client is much less efficient, and not able to join a pool. Rather than clutter the Bitcoin code with all sorts of different implementations of the mining algorithm, it's better to encourage users to use the specialized software. Leaving the generate option gives new users the impression that they can easily make money, when in reality it's running their CPU at 100% and they will most likely never see a block created.

[Dusty]

Leaving the generate option gives new users the impression that they can easily make money, when in reality it's running their CPU at 100% and they will most likely never see a block created.

In my opinion is just a matter of comunication: just clarify that this options is not likely to generate coins but will help secure the network, and leave the people the choice on how to employ his idle cpu time.
Also, in the very near future energy will be almost free, just dig the news about Rossi's "e-cat" on google, already validated by 2 universities (Italy and Sweden) and in commerce at the end of the year.

Anyway, if I'm understanding the thing right, even with very low hashing power, having millions of users could help secure the network and distributing more evenly the power of the pools.

Of course this could be done much better if the installer of the client had a simple option to download and run a hashing program using the GPU, but until this procedure is not made simple for the end user I think that the option to enable generation should be given, just renamed and better explained.

[xf2_org]

Anyway, if I'm understanding the thing right, even with very low hashing power, having millions of users could help secure the network and distributing more evenly the power of the pools.

True.

But good luck convincing millions of people to run their computers full-bore, paying electricity costs of all that inefficiency along the way, just to help secure the bitcoin network without further reward.

Do the math.  It is astronomically unlikely that you will ever generate a block with CPU mining.  You are more likely to win the lottery three times in a row, and get struck by lightning twice on the same day, with a black cat striding across your path (with a pink elephant on its back).

[BitterTea]

Do the math.  It is astronomically unlikely that you will ever generate a block with CPU mining.  You are more likely to win the lottery three times in a row, and get struck by lightning twice on the same day, with a black cat striding across your path (with a pink elephant on its back).

Additionally, and perhaps even more importantly, it will only get more unlikely over time (as difficulty increases).

[Dusty]

Do the math.  It is astronomically unlikely that you will ever generate a block with CPU mining.  You are more likely to win the lottery three times in a row, and get struck by lightning twice on the same day, with a black cat striding across your path (with a pink elephant on its back).

Additionally, and perhaps even more importantly, it will only get more unlikely over time (as difficulty increases).[/quote]
You are completely right, of course.

But think of how many people helped the SETI@home project installing a fat application on their computer.... And the chance to detect something there are much lower than finding a block.
It's practically zero for SETI, while we discover around 144 blocks every day ;-)