Offline mining?

[the joint]

Is it possible to have an offline miner submit saved proof of work?

In other words, is it possible to have a miner attempt to solve blocks for a given period of time (say, 24 hours), store the hashes, and then submit all of the work to the network in bulk after the 24 hours? 

[1715080544]

1715080544

[Hawkix]

Generally, NO.

However, if your "miner" can generate about 144 new blocks per day (about 8 TH/sec now), you have a chance to succeed.

[the joint]

Generally, NO.

However, if your "miner" can generate about 144 new blocks per day (about 8 TH/sec now), you have a chance to succeed.

Really...

Could you please elaborate on how one would go about doing this, assuming they had access to that much hashing power?

[Hawkix]

If you own more than 51% of the total hashing power, you can "overvote" the results of other miners. Still you will need to connect sooner than after a day. It was not meant as serious tip .

The reason you need to be connected to the Internet all the time is that there is new block found each approx. 10 minutes and once it is found, your current search must be dumped and you start again on new one. Also, in the rare chance you would find a block yourself, you need to broadcast it as soon as possible, otherwise someone other may take your victory and announce its own block instead of yours.

[the joint]

If you own more than 51% of the total hashing power, you can "overvote" the results of other miners. Still you will need to connect sooner than after a day. It was not meant as serious tip .

The reason you need to be connected to the Internet all the time is that there is new block found each approx. 10 minutes and once it is found, your current search must be dumped and you start again on new one. Also, in the rare chance you would find a block yourself, you need to broadcast it as soon as possible, otherwise someone other may take your victory and announce its own block instead of yours.

Well, let's (hypothetically, of course) say that you had access to around 2 t/hash.

Why do the results need to be dumped?  Why can't they be stored and submitted all at once such that you might get like 10 blocks back to back?

Edit:  In short, couldn't you simply have a computer take the hashing algorithm, process it offline, save the results of the work, connect to the network, then dump all the results at once?

[Hawkix]

It can be dumped, but your chain must be longer than that already mined outside of your miners. With 2TH/sec the chances are very low you will prepare longer chain.

[P4man]

Edit:  In short, couldn't you simply have a computer take the hashing algorithm, process it offline, save the results of the work, connect to the network, then dump all the results at once?

Blocks are linked. You need the previous block to calculate the nonce (which includes a hash of the previous block). Thats why you cant mine offline for longer than ~10 minutes. After 10 minutes you are essentially forking.

[sadpandatech]

Edit:  In short, couldn't you simply have a computer take the hashing algorithm, process it offline, save the results of the work, connect to the network, then dump all the results at once?

Blocks are linked. You need the previous block to calculate the nonce (which includes a hash of the previous block). Thats why you cant mine offline for longer than ~10 minutes. After 10 minutes you are essentially forking.

^^ This answers the orignal question.

May I ask what is your goal? Are you trying to save bandwidth? Looking to 'mask' the reporting daemon? Trying to minimize net exposure?

[the joint]

Edit:  In short, couldn't you simply have a computer take the hashing algorithm, process it offline, save the results of the work, connect to the network, then dump all the results at once?

Blocks are linked. You need the previous block to calculate the nonce (which includes a hash of the previous block). Thats why you cant mine offline for longer than ~10 minutes. After 10 minutes you are essentially forking.

^^ This answers te orignal question.

May I ask what is your goal? Are you trying to save bandwidth? Looking to 'mask' the reporting daemon? Trying to minimize net exposure?

Well, I may have access to 2 T/hash under certain conditions, and hashing offline may be one of those conditions.

[grue]

Well, I may have access to 2 T/hash under certain conditions, and hashing offline may be one of those conditions.

forking is not exactly good for the network, because all the transactions in the past n blocks are now effectively reversed

[plastic.elastic]

Edit:  In short, couldn't you simply have a computer take the hashing algorithm, process it offline, save the results of the work, connect to the network, then dump all the results at once?

Blocks are linked. You need the previous block to calculate the nonce (which includes a hash of the previous block). Thats why you cant mine offline for longer than ~10 minutes. After 10 minutes you are essentially forking.

^^ This answers te orignal question.

May I ask what is your goal? Are you trying to save bandwidth? Looking to 'mask' the reporting daemon? Trying to minimize net exposure?

Well, I may have access to 2 T/hash under certain conditions, and hashing offline may be one of those conditions.

Noob, hows your basement operation going?

[the joint]

Edit:  In short, couldn't you simply have a computer take the hashing algorithm, process it offline, save the results of the work, connect to the network, then dump all the results at once?

Blocks are linked. You need the previous block to calculate the nonce (which includes a hash of the previous block). Thats why you cant mine offline for longer than ~10 minutes. After 10 minutes you are essentially forking.

^^ This answers te orignal question.

May I ask what is your goal? Are you trying to save bandwidth? Looking to 'mask' the reporting daemon? Trying to minimize net exposure?

Well, I may have access to 2 T/hash under certain conditions, and hashing offline may be one of those conditions.

Noob, hows your basement operation going?

Not bad.  How is it running around the evolutionary cul-de-sac?

And in response to SadPandaTech, minimizing net exposure, yes.

[plastic.elastic]

Edit:  In short, couldn't you simply have a computer take the hashing algorithm, process it offline, save the results of the work, connect to the network, then dump all the results at once?

Blocks are linked. You need the previous block to calculate the nonce (which includes a hash of the previous block). Thats why you cant mine offline for longer than ~10 minutes. After 10 minutes you are essentially forking.

^^ This answers te orignal question.

May I ask what is your goal? Are you trying to save bandwidth? Looking to 'mask' the reporting daemon? Trying to minimize net exposure?

Well, I may have access to 2 T/hash under certain conditions, and hashing offline may be one of those conditions.

Noob, hows your basement operation going?

Not bad.  How is it running around the evolutionary cul-de-sac?

And in response to SadPandaTech, minimizing net exposure, yes.

A true dumbass would never know why ppl call them a dumbass. You're a perfect example of that saying.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Edit:  In short, couldn't you simply have a computer take the hashing algorithm, process it offline, save the results of the work, connect to the network, then dump all the results at once?

Blocks are linked. You need the previous block to calculate the nonce (which includes a hash of the previous block). Thats why you cant mine offline for longer than ~10 minutes. After 10 minutes you are essentially forking.

^^ This answers te orignal question.

May I ask what is your goal? Are you trying to save bandwidth? Looking to 'mask' the reporting daemon? Trying to minimize net exposure?

Well, I may have access to 2 T/hash under certain conditions, and hashing offline may be one of those conditions.

If you can't connect the computing power to the internet (or some other method of updating the miners) it is useless for mining.  

Remember you need to be solving the next block.  Every 10 minutes "somebody' solves a block.   When that happens your data is stale and if you find a block it is useless as you are solving the wrong block.  A farm which could only connect to the internet once every minute would be horrible inefficient (stales) but would work.   On average you would lose 10% of your hashing power because the data has gone stale and you won't know it until the next update.  Still 2TH * 0.9 = 1.8TH effective.

Longer periods of time between updates will quickly make it impossible to work on the same blockchain as everyone else. Your only hope would be to build a longer chain in private and publish it all at once.  The problem is that for any extended period of time the odds you will have a longer chain is negligible.

As an example, say you have 25% of network capacity and decide to mine privately for x blocks and then publish them all at once if it is longer than the main chain.  

If x = 1 (connect to internet and publish block chain after finding one block) then you have a 25% chance of having longest chain.
If x = 2 (publish after finding two back to back blocks) then you have only a 0.25^2 = 6.25% chance.
If x = 3 0.25^3 = 1.56%
..
If x =6 0.25^6 = 0.02% (1 in 4096 chance).  Even 6 blocks is only on average 4 hours for a 2TH subnet.

So connecting to the network once every 6 blocks and checking to see if you are ahead would earn you (6 * 50 ) / 4096 = 0.08 BTC and it would take 4 hours.  Note you wouldn't earn 0.08 BTC each time.   You would earn 300 BTC 1/4096th of the time and 0 BTC 4095/4096th of the time.  On average despite having 2 TH you would only earn about 0.5 BTC per day (roughly the same as a 500 MH rig which is continually updated).

Now hypothetically if you have some constraint that you could RECEIVE data but only TRANSMIT every couple hours you could operate w/ full efficiency.  Variance would be astronomical (magnitudes higher than normal solo mining) but you could
1) send any block chain updates to the farm
2) if farm is more than 1 block behind it abandons the chain
4) if farm is ahead by 1 or more blocks and time greater than transmit threshold it transmits.

Since you are winning or losing multiple blocks per batch you are going to face very high variance but your expected return (EV) will be the same.

[jjiimm_64]

helluva nice explanation .  I think I may have understood that

[the joint]

Edit:  In short, couldn't you simply have a computer take the hashing algorithm, process it offline, save the results of the work, connect to the network, then dump all the results at once?

Blocks are linked. You need the previous block to calculate the nonce (which includes a hash of the previous block). Thats why you cant mine offline for longer than ~10 minutes. After 10 minutes you are essentially forking.

^^ This answers te orignal question.

May I ask what is your goal? Are you trying to save bandwidth? Looking to 'mask' the reporting daemon? Trying to minimize net exposure?

Well, I may have access to 2 T/hash under certain conditions, and hashing offline may be one of those conditions.

Noob, hows your basement operation going?

Not bad.  How is it running around the evolutionary cul-de-sac?

And in response to SadPandaTech, minimizing net exposure, yes.

A true dumbass would never know why ppl call them a dumbass. You're a perfect example of that saying.

Well, statistically, you have about a .5% chance of being more intelligent than I according to 'g.' 

Do you know what projection is?

[the joint]

Edit:  In short, couldn't you simply have a computer take the hashing algorithm, process it offline, save the results of the work, connect to the network, then dump all the results at once?

Blocks are linked. You need the previous block to calculate the nonce (which includes a hash of the previous block). Thats why you cant mine offline for longer than ~10 minutes. After 10 minutes you are essentially forking.

^^ This answers te orignal question.

May I ask what is your goal? Are you trying to save bandwidth? Looking to 'mask' the reporting daemon? Trying to minimize net exposure?

Well, I may have access to 2 T/hash under certain conditions, and hashing offline may be one of those conditions.

If you can't connect the computing power to the internet (or some other method of updating the miners) it is useless for mining.  

Remember you need to be solving the next block.  Every 10 minutes "somebody' solves a block.   When that happens your data is stale and if you find a block it is useless as you are solving the wrong block.  A farm which could only connect to the internet once every minute would be horrible inefficient (stales) but would work.   On average you would lose 10% of your hashing power because the data has gone stale and you won't know it until the next update.  Still 2TH * 0.9 = 1.8TH effective.

Longer periods of time between updates will quickly make it impossible to work on the same blockchain as everyone else. Your only hope would be to build a longer chain in private and publish it all at once.  The problem is that for any extended period of time the odds you will have a longer chain is negligible.

As an example, say you have 25% of network capacity and decide to mine privately for x blocks and then publish them all at once if it is longer than the main chain.  

If x = 1 (connect to internet and publish block chain after finding one block) then you have a 25% chance of having longest chain.
If x = 2 (publish after finding two back to back blocks) then you have only a 0.25^2 = 6.25% chance.
If x = 3 0.25^3 = 1.56%
..
If x =6 0.25^6 = 0.02% (1 in 4096 chance).  Even 6 blocks is only on average 4 hours for a 2TH subnet.

So connecting to the network once every 6 blocks and checking to see if you are ahead would earn you (6 * 50 ) / 4096 = 0.08 BTC and it would take 4 hours.  Note you wouldn't earn 0.08 BTC each time.   You would earn 300 BTC 1/4096th of the time and 0 BTC 4095/4096th of the time.  On average despite having 2 TH you would only earn about 0.5 BTC per day (roughly the same as a 500 MH rig which is continually updated).

Now hypothetically if you have some constraint that you could RECEIVE data but only TRANSMIT every couple hours you could operate w/ full efficiency.  Variance would be astronomical (magnitudes higher than normal solo mining) but you could
1) send any block chain updates to the farm
2) if farm is more than 1 block behind it abandons the chain
4) if farm is ahead by 1 or more blocks and time greater than transmit threshold it transmits.

Since you are winning or losing multiple blocks per batch you are going to face very high variance but your expected return (EV) will be the same.

Thank you for this!

[TeaL]

Was no-one else curious about how he would have access to 2 TH?

[plastic.elastic]

Was no-one else curious about how he would have access to 2 TH?

Do you really need to ask?

Look up the fucker's thread history, you will see his thread about "free" electricity

I'm not suprised, he got another "free" computational power some where....

[the joint]

Was no-one else curious about how he would have access to 2 TH?

Do you really need to ask?

Look up the fucker's thread history, you will see his thread about "free" electricity

I'm not suprised, he got another "free" computational power some where....

Yeah.  Because, you know, I really want to attempt to squeeze out 2 T/hash using the free electricity I get from renting a room of a house that was built in the 1950's.

Got to 1 T/hash before my clothes started to melt into my skin.