Is it supposed to take this long to generate some "phat coin"?

[ichi]

Can any of the following time series be determined, or estimated, from block data?

(1) number of nodes
(2) total Khash/s for all nodes
(3) Khash/s per node

[1714185392]

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[knightmb]

Yea, we still haven't gotten easier since nenold withdrew his 1000 cores.

That's because he never had them to begin with. Mainly because there are some members on this forum that have triple his claimed resources and they know how much he should be really generating if he did have that setup going for that long.

No, he had something.  Otherwise the difficulty wouldn't have increased so significantly.

I still don't believe it though, mainly from a logistics standpoint. I won't argue if he has 85K BTC but you can go back in time on all the blocks here http://nullvoid.org/bitcoin/statistix.php and with a good spreadsheet and knowledge of how fast they are created (creation times are all there), he would have to created every *single* block (meaning not a single person was getting one) for 11 days straight 24/7

Further evidence is since he claims to have turned it off, the difficulty still has not changed. So either the interest in Bit Coin has grown to a level that the difficulty will naturally remain that high or someone else has filled in his place for block generation with another large server farm setup. 85K BTC is like sitting on over $4,200 USD which unless he had free server time, would have cost him nearly $33,000 USD for the 11 day sprint (with no competition from anyone else mind you) if he was using the Amazon Cloud Computing like he claimed.

And to top it off, say he did spend the $$$ to place a 1,000 core server farm at his fingertips, that's still small in comparison to the total amount of CPU out there generating Bit Coins, so he would be lucky to get 1 in every 10 blocks that way, further making it take over 110 days to generate that much BTC at a cost of nearly a half-million dollars of CPU time.

The numbers don't add up for his feat in my opinion unless he had a 100,000 core server farm setup for free. I would place my bets on that he was just blowing smoke.

[Quantumplation]

We've still got 1060 something blocks to go before it readjusts difficulty.

Also, while I don't believe his claim on how MUCH BTC he got, I still believe he had the 1000 cores crunching on it.  Also, there's MAYBE 1000 cores generating BTC =/ The user base isn't THAT big yet.

So, did he generate ungodly amounts of BTC?  No.  Did he put enough CPU into the system to disrupt the difficulty process, which has yet to adjust back downward? Yes.

[knightmb]

We've still got 1060 something blocks to go before it readjusts difficulty.

Also, while I don't believe his claim on how MUCH BTC he got, I still believe he had the 1000 cores crunching on it.  Also, there's MAYBE 1000 cores generating BTC =/ The user base isn't THAT big yet.

So, did he generate ungodly amounts of BTC?  No.  Did he put enough CPU into the system to disrupt the difficulty process, which has yet to adjust back downward? Yes.

That's a third option I hadn't considered, thanks for pointing that out.

[NewLibertyStandard]

Did he put enough CPU into the system to disrupt the difficulty process, which has yet to adjust back downward? Yes.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding something here that should be obvious to me, but why would the difficulty adjust downward? Block generation has been averaging around 9 blocks per hour for a few days now, so won't the next adjustment be upward?

According to those statistics the difficulty should either increase or stay the same, but not decrease.

It should be one block every 10 minutes, or about 6 per hour. The difficulty should almost halve itself.

You've got something mixed up. If more than 6 blocks are completed per hour on average then difficulty increases and if less than 6 blocks are completed per hour on average then the difficulty decreases.

[Quantumplation]

Did he put enough CPU into the system to disrupt the difficulty process, which has yet to adjust back downward? Yes.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding something here that should be obvious to me, but why would the difficulty adjust downward? Block generation has been averaging around 9 blocks per hour for a few days now, so won't the next adjustment be upward?

Oh, right, hadn't realized it was at 10/min.  Still, it's a whole lot slower than when I started generating, so yea, it's supposed to be this hard. =P

[ichi]

OK, we're at 9 blocks per hour now, and the target is 6.  Therefore, difficulty is about to increase by ~50% -- and NOT decrease 

FWIW, I did just get a block on a machine doing ~2,000 Khash/s, which implies ~0.1 block per day on average.  That's about right, I believe (not that I can conclude anything with N=1).

It's obvious that the swarm's aggregate CPU resources are still growing rapidly.  Perhaps nenolod, if s/he ever had 1,000 CPUs in the swarm, is just renting them to someone else.  Indeed, perhaps s/he's renting N-CPU packages    Or 

Anyway, there ought to be a way to know what's happening in the swarm.  We need to know if we're being attacked, right?  And we need mechanisms to defend the swarm, right?  I'm not talking about breaking anonymity.

[jgarzik]

Anyway, there ought to be a way to know what's happening in the swarm.  We need to know if we're being attacked, right?  And we need mechanisms to defend the swarm, right?  I'm not talking about breaking anonymity.

swarm metrics (network metrics) would be quite useful.  Anything is better than watching an IRC forum full of bots.

[ichi]

swarm metrics (network metrics) would be quite useful.  Anything is better than watching an IRC forum full of bots.

I don't do IRC, and have never looked.

Is there a way to log the IRC channel (potential n00b question, I know)?  Do all nodes access it?  I recall seeing something about a flag for not doing so.